QA Automation Engineer

About You You are passionate about software quality and take ownership of ensuring applications perform reliably throughout the development lifecycle. You enjoy combining manual and automated testing approaches to identify risks, validate functionality, and help teams deliver high-quality products. You are proactive, detail-oriented, and comfortable collaborating with cross-functional teams while independently driving day-to-day QA activities. You are comfortable adapting between functional testing, automation, regression, defect validation, system testing, and UAT according to project needs. You Bring to Applaudo the Following Competencies: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field is desired, or equivalent professional experience. 3+ years of professional experience in Quality Assurance, Software Testing, or related roles. Strong hands-on experience performing functional and regression testing of web applications. Experience building, maintaining, and executing automated test suites for web applications. Hands-on experience with automation frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or equivalent. Hands-on experience testing REST APIs, including requests, responses, status codes, error scenarios, and integrations. Experience independently designing and maintaining test plans, test cases, and regression suites based on requirements and acceptance criteria. Strong understanding of defect lifecycle management, including identification, documentation, reproduction, triage, validation, and regression verification. Experience performing integration and system testing throughout the software development lifecycle. Experience working within Agile environments and collaborating directly with developers, Product teams, and other stakeholders. Ability to independently execute and manage assigned QA activities while proactively communicating progress, risks, defects, and blockers. Strong analytical, problem-solv