Senior Quality Engineer

Senior Quality Engineer StarRez

As a Senior Quality Engineer for CollegePads, you will play a pivotal role in elevating our quality practices across the CollegePads product. You will be an expert within our engineering organization, deeply understanding product and systems of our off-campus student housing product. This role will balance hands-on individual contributor responsibilities along with leading, influencing, and coaching your peers.

This senior individual contributor role is for someone who is passionate about seeing systems holistically, has a vision of quality, and is eager to drive and ensure the highest standards of quality and stability for our CollegePads off-campus housing ecosystem. You will leverage your deep understanding of the product and complex system integrations to guide and influence our development process.

Your role is not to manage a team, but to be a quality champion who partners directly with developers, helping them to see different aspects of their features, anticipate risk, and build more robust, scalable, and reliable software. At the core of this role is a strong focus on the customer experience; success means were solving customer problems and making our platform more intuitive and reliable.

Responsibilities

• Own and drive end-to-end testing strategy for complex distributed systems, proactively identifying risks, integration challenges, and performance bottlenecks while establishing clear quality vision across the product.

• Implement quality-first processes that embed testing considerations early in the development lifecycle, collaborating with Product, Design, and Engineering teams from ideation through delivery.

• Provide quality focused input on testability, scalability, and reliability during ticket grooming and feature discussions, offering insights on product resilience and usability considerations while defining and championing product-focused quality standards and engineering best practices.

• Design and execute integration testing strategies and performance testing for CollegePads' distributed systems, with experience in service virtualization and ability to build pragmatic solutions using engineering principles

• Champion shift-left quality culture by mentoring developers on testing principles and TDD, clear acceptance criteria, early validation and fast feedback loops. Partner with teams to identify systemic quality challenges and create improvement plans

• Establish data-driven quality management by implementing comprehensive metrics and KPIs to assess team maturity, track system health, and demonstrate measurable impact of quality initiatives across the product.

• Drive innovative quality engineering approaches specifically for CollegePads, taking full accountability for successful execution and adoption across our product development teams.

• Ability to work with ambiguity, proactive in designing solutions based on data when non currently exists.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of progressive software engineering experience with deep focus on quality engineering in complex, distributed system environments.

• Proven track record as a senior software engineer with strong quality mindset and ability to influence technical direction through innovative, pragmatic approaches.

• Exceptional systems-thinking mindset toward quality challenges, with natural ability to see integration complexities, performance implications, and reliability concerns across the product.

• Outstanding engineering problem-solving skills with talent for creative approaches to quality challenges, root cause analysis of complex system behaviours, and innovative solutions that go beyond traditional testing.

• Excellent technical communication and collaboration skills to effectively guide and influence engineering peers through deep technical expertise and strategic quality insights.

• Genuine curiosity and passion for understanding product architecture, user experience flows, and business impact of engineering decisions.

• Strong programming skills with hands-on experience building testing infrastructure and test automation frameworks from the ground up.

• Deep experience designing performance and scalability testing strategies using engineering creativity to solve unique system challenges.

• Strong database and data architecture knowledge (SQL/NoSQL) for comprehensive system verification, test data management, and quality validation strategies across complex data flows