Lead Software Engineer in Test
Los Angeles, CAAll locationsLos Angeles, CANashville, TNNew York City, NYPortland, OR Remote
$160,000–$180,000 a yearJobFig found this opening at its original source and checks that it remains available.
About the role
We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer in Test to be the senior-most quality voice on CD Baby’s flagship customer-facing software: the members application our artists use to distribute their music, get paid, and understand their audiences, and the .com marketing site that brings new artists into the platform. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with broad technical authority over how we test — the engineer who treats quality as a software engineering discipline and builds the practice to prove it. In the near term, you will help carry our customer-facing platform across the finish line for a brand relaunch worthy of CD Baby — standing up the automated coverage, the test data, and the CI/CD gates that let us ship with confidence. Beyond launch, your defining mandate is to architect our testing practice from the ground up: choose the frameworks, build the suites, integrate them into our delivery pipeline, and make automated, AI-augmented testing a first-class capability of the team as our customer-facing stack evolves from a .NET monolith into a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture. This is a role for an engineer who is energized by both the discipline of writing the code that proves our software works every day, and the craft of designing a testing program that scales with the platform underneath it.
What you'll bring
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with a deep specialization in test automation, or equivalent experience as a Senior/Staff/Lead SDET, SET, or Quality Engineer at companies that treat testing as an engineering discipline.
- Demonstrated track record of architecting a testing practice from early stage to mature — selecting frameworks, building suites, integrating them into CI/CD, and earning the trust of the engineering organization over time.
- Phenomenal hands-on coding ability.
- You write production-quality code, and your tests look like production code: well-factored, well-named, easy to maintain, and built to last.
- Strong experience with Playwright (or comparable modern end-to-end frameworks such as Cypress or Selenium) and a clear point of view on when and how to use them.
- Deep experience with API testing and contract testing, including testing the seams between your application and critical third-party APIs.
- You know how to mock, stub, and record/replay responsibly, and when each is appropriate.
- Experience designing and running performance and load testing programs, with the judgment to choose the right tooling for the workload (k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust, etc.).
- Hands-on experience applying AI to testing workflows — AI-assisted test authoring, suite generation, self-healing tests, AI-driven coverage analysis, or comparable approaches.
- You are fluent with modern AI coding tools and treat them as core to your craft.
- Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.
- the ability to learn our specific stack quickly is required.