Are you passionate about testing and get excited by helping to shape the testing strategy and framework at an organizational level? We’re looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to join us at Thinkific.
As a Senior SDET, you'll join Thinkific's Platform Engineering team, a group of SREs, DevOps engineers, front-end engineers, and SDETs. We own the foundation every other team builds on: our AWS infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, Playwright test frameworks, and the engineering standards that keep our Rails platform reliable. We believe quality belongs to everyone and gets built into the pipeline, not checked at the end, and we try to automate toil out of existence. Reporting to the Senior Engineering Manager, you'll shape how every Thinkific engineer tests and ships code by building shared frameworks, quality gates, and best practices for the whole engineering org, and by working directly with individual teams when a problem needs a closer look. Thousands of creators run their businesses on Thinkific, so your work protects their revenue and ours while helping every team release with confidence.
Your goal will be to advocate for quality at all times and keep the development team accountable to QA best practices. Here’s how you’ll accomplish this:
- Lead the evolution of Thinkific’s test automation strategy by designing scalable and maintainable automation frameworks for web, API, integration, and component level testing
- Develop advanced automation suites across front end, back end, services and integrations using modern tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar
- Drive improvements to our CI/CD delivery pipeline by optimizing build efficiency, reliability and parallelization
- Act as a technical mentor and coach for engineers and SDETs while elevating skills in test design, automation patterns and quality best practices
- Collaborate with Product Managers, Developers, QA and Operations to ensure clarity of requirements, testability and quality expectations
- Establish test strategies and quality guardrails for large features, system redesigns, architectural initiatives and cross team projects
- Introduce and evaluate new tools, frameworks and testing technologies through POCs and experimentation
- Influence long term quality direction by contributing to the QA automation roadmap and organizational testing strategy
- Champion observability and monitoring using tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or similar to improve product reliability
- Lead root cause analysis for complex issues and ensure preventive automation is created as part of a continuous quality mindset
- Maintain and enforce quality assurance policies and procedures for consistency across teams and product areas
The person we have in mind likely:
- Has 5+ years of experience in automation and software testing, including building automation frameworks and guiding teams
- Demonstrates deep expertise in end-to-end testing, integration testing, API testing and service level automation using tools like Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or Protractor
- Has strong experience designing automated test frameworks for Ruby on Rails and React applications
- Understands modern software engineering principles, testing patterns, and automation architecture
- Has hands-on experience with CI and CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins or Semaphore and has optimized pipelines at scale
- Possesses strong knowledge of quality engineering including test strategy, testability analysis, test design patterns and risk based testing
- Has experience with monitoring, observability and log aggregation tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic or Airbrake
- Brings experience with performance and load testing using tools like JMeter, K6 or Gatling
- Is comfortable working in distributed systems, microservices or cloud based architectures
- Excels at mentorship, technical leadership and uplifting others through coaching and pairing
- Is a creative problem solver who thrives in ambiguous or fast moving environments
- Communicates effectively to influence cross team decisions and drive alignment
- Loves to learn, experiment, and explore new technologies while bringing fresh ideas to elevate quality across the organization
These things would also be nice, but we think you could learn them on the job:
- Experience testing AI agents, e.g. evaluation (evals) for LLM-based features, RAG systems, or agentic workflows. Familiarity with online, offline, or building eval frameworks (DSPy, Langfuse or similar) is a plus.
- Experience establishing testing standards and governance across multiple teams
- Experience shaping or owning a company wide test automation roadmap
- Experience with AI-driven testing tools or autonomous test generation
- Familiarity with education technology platforms or LMS systems
- Experience building test environments, synthetic data systems or contract testing frameworks
The recruitment compensation range for this position is $87,600 - 109,500 - 131,400 (this range is base salary only). Your specific compensation within this range is determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal equity assessment. The range is designed to capture the full journey from developing skills to excelling in the position. Most new hires start between the minimum and midpoint, which aligns with being fully capable in the role. Salaries above the midpoint are typically reserved for team members who have demonstrated strong, consistent performance, deep expertise, and a significant positive impact within the role.
For high-demand or hard-to-fill positions like this one, we may hire above midpoint for candidates who bring exceptional experience, skills, or impact potential.
The Hiring Journey
- An exploratory call with our Talent team
- An impact-focused interview with the Hiring Manager
- Technical stage
- Stakeholder Interview with cross-collaborators
For a deeper look at our hiring process, what to expect during each step, AI guidelines, and how to prepare, visit our Candidate Hub ⭐
