Qa Architect

Role Description

This is a contract role for a Senior Principal Quality Assurance Engineer / Quality Assurance Architect, working with a US-based product company operating in a regulated, data-sensitive domain. It is a hands-on architect role, not a management or manual-testing role. You will own the quality and automation strategy end to end, extend an existing automation foundation, and most importantly design and build automation for complex, event-driven scenarios that go well beyond typical request-response API testing.

This is a remote role with work-from-home flexibility, and requires a daily overlap with US Eastern working hours.

What you'll own

• Automation-first, always. We are not looking for a manual tester. You may manually test a new feature once to understand its behaviour, but in the same sprint you raise the backlog story to automate it. Automation is not a "later" activity here; it is how we work. If your instinct is to defer automation to a "hardening sprint," this role is not for you.
• Design automation for event-driven systems. Our current framework handles typical API endpoints well (built on Playwright). The harder, unsolved work is automating asynchronous, event-driven flows — where a message is published to a queue or topic, one or more services consume it, and the correct outcome only appears after several steps and some delay. You will design and build the framework for this: producing and consuming events, asserting on eventually-consistent state, correlating events across services, and managing test data cleanly.
• Use data as a first-class testing tool. We have a large data estate. You must be genuinely strong at writing complex SQL — joins, aggregations, window functions — so you can independently traverse that data to design test cases and verify outcomes. You will also handle test data responsibly, using de-identified or synthetic data rather than exposing sensitive records.
• Build quality into the pipeline. Integrate automated checks into CI/CD so quality is continuous, not a gate at the end.
• Make results visible. Build clear, consolidated test reporting into the end of each CI/CD pipeline run, and publish it where product and stakeholders can actually see it (for example, a report artifact or an S3-hosted results page) rather than leaving results buried in pipeline logs. Given how closely this role works with non-QA people, "what passed, what failed, and what the risk is" needs to be legible at a glance.
• Communicate and influence. You will work directly and closely with product owners, stakeholders, and engineering. You must be able to translate requirements into a test strategy, articulate risk plainly to non-QA people, and hold your position with sound reasoning.
• Raise the bar for the team. Set standards, introduce practices like contract/schema testing for services, and mentor engineers on writing testable, well-covered code.

Must have

• 15+ years in QA/SDET/quality engineering, with a substantial and recent portion still deeply hands-on in automation — you are writing and designing framework code today, not only reviewing it.
• Proven experience designing an automation framework from scratch, ideally for asynchronous, event-driven, or microservices-based systems (message queues, topics, pub/sub) — not only UI or simple REST.
• Strong command of a modern automation stack (Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, REST Assured, or similar) and real fluency in at least one of TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, or Java.
• Strong hands-on SQL — able to write and reason about complex queries against a large dataset without hand-holding.
• Hands-on with the AWS surface of an event-driven system. You should be comfortable operating and observing the stack, not just reading about it: reading and tracing through CloudWatch logs; working with SNS and SQS to drive and verify message flows; reading from and writing to S3; invoking Lambda functions and interacting with build pipelines; SES for email flows; Valkey / Redis for caching and in-memory data; and containerised workloads (ECS / EKS / Docker). This isn't a "familiarity" ask — you'll use these directly to set up test conditions and confirm outcomes.
• Solid working knowledge of compliance in a regulated domain — handling of sensitive/personal data, audit trails, access controls, and the discipline of not using raw production data in test.
• Excellent written and spoken English, and genuine comfort working directly with product and US-based stakeholders.
• Working fluency with Agile/Scrum, defect tracking, and CI/CD.
• Available to start at short notice.

Nice to have

• Healthcare / health-tech domain experience, and familiarity with HIPAA / PHI handling — a strong plus.
• Experience with Kafka or other streaming platforms (if your event backbone goes beyond SNS/SQS).
• Contract testing (e.g., Pact), performance and scalability testing (e.g., k6, JMeter, Gatling), and test-container-based approaches.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.

Engagement details

• Contract engagement; you would be an individual contractor on VidyaMohan Software Solutions' payroll (not a B2B / vendor arrangement).
• India-based; Pune strongly preferred for closer collaboration.
• 2–3 hours of daily overlap with US Eastern time required.
• 6-month contract, extendable based on fit and performance.