Senior Engineer in Test - Applications

Role Summary

Alpaca is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Senior Engineer in Test (SDET) to join our dynamic and growing team. In this pivotal role, you will be instrumental in ensuring the quality, reliability, and scalability of our frontend applications and the APIs that power them. You will be a key contributor to our engineering culture, championing best practices in test automation, applications quality, and developer enablement.

As a Senior Engineer in Test, you will be responsible for designing, developing, and executing comprehensive testing strategies for our React/TypeScript applications, along with supporting backend services where appropriate. You will work closely with software developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to identify testing requirements and build robust UI, integration, end-to-end and mobile automation testing frameworks that ensure exceptional user experience and product quality.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in software development, a passion for quality, and deep expertise in testing modern web and mobile applications in a fast-paced, agile SaaS environment. You will serve as the subject matter expert for testing across the organization—enabling teams to upskill, adopt effective testing practices, and ramp up their automation efforts. Your leadership will help elevate our approach to frontend and full-stack quality, ensuring our products are both reliable and delightful to use.

Things You Get To Do:

Test Strategy and Planning

• Design, develop, and implement comprehensive test strategies for our React/TypeScript applications, supporting services and public facing APIs.
• Ensure strong coverage of functional and non-functional requirements in collaboration with Product Engineering teams.
• Define testing approaches for component, integration, and end-to-end user flows.

Frontend Automation Framework Development

• Build, maintain, and evolve our automated testing frameworks using tools such as Playwright, React Testing Library, and Jest/Vitest.
• Establish patterns, utilities, fixtures, and best practices that scale across multiple teams and applications.
• Integrate automated testing into CI pipelines to ensure fast, reliable feedback loops.

E2E, Integration, and UI Testing

• Develop robust automated E2E test suites for core user journeys, error paths, authentication flows, and complex UIs.
• Improve reliability, consistency, and speed of UI tests by refining mocking strategies, API stubbing, and data setup.
• Ensure cross-browser and cross-device test coverage when relevant.

API & Contract Testing

• Implement and maintain API integration tests used by frontend applications.
• Implement and maintain API and contract tests for high-performance, low-latency public facing APIs.
• Validate frontend–backend interactions with a focus on user-facing behavior, correctness, consistency and idempotency when applicable.

Tooling and Infrastructure for Quality

• Enhance CI build pipelines for frontend test execution, parallelization, and reporting.
• Optimize test reliability, flakiness detection, and runtime performance.

Collaboration & Quality Enablement

• Work closely with frontend and full-stack engineers to embed testing best practices into the development lifecycle.
• Participate in design reviews, grooming sessions, and architecture discussions to ensure quality considerations are addressed early.
• Advocate for a strong quality engineering culture across the organization.

Mentorship & Developer Enablement

• Mentor engineers in writing effective unit, integration, and E2E tests for React/TypeScript applications.
• Provide sample tests, pair-programming sessions, documentation, and workshops to help teams adopt the testing frameworks.
• Champion a mindset of continuous improvement.

Who You Are (Must-Haves):

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in JavaScript/TypeScript and familiarity with modern React/React Native development.
• Hands-on experience with frontend testing tools such as Playwright (required), Jest or Vitest
• Experience with mobile test automation frameworks (e.g., Detox, Appium, Maestro, or similar).
• Experience designing UI testing strategies for frontend architectures, including routing, state management, API mocking, and asynchronous flows.
• Experience with REST/gRPC API testing and contract validation (OpenAPI/Protobuf).
• Strong understanding of CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.).
• Familiarity with modern cloud environments (GCP, AWS, etc.) in the context of leveraging dev/test environments.
• Understanding of containerized development workflows (Docker), not as a primary responsibility but as a useful skill.
• Knowledge of web security basics including authentication (JWT/OAuth) and negative testing patterns.

Soft Skills

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities with a strong attention to detail.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain testing concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Collaborative mindset with experience working in agile, cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrated leadership in testing practices and the ability to mentor team members effectively.
• Adaptability and comfort in fast-paced SaaS product environments.

Experience

• 5+ years as an SDET, Fullstack QA Engineer, or Quality Engineer with significant automation experience.
• Proven track record of testing high-quality web and/or mobile applications (preferably React/TypeScript and React Native) and SaaS products.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building automated test frameworks from the ground up
• Experience testing systems where errors have real financial or regulatory impact (e.g., trading, payments, ledgering, or custody systems).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Who You Might Be (Nice-to-Haves):

• Algo trading experience (either professional or personal)
• Experience or understanding of financial markets
• Experience working at a startup
• Experience working remotely