QA Automation Engineer Jobs in Virginia

Senior QA Automation Engineer - Cloud & Infrastructure Platforms (DoD / GovCloud)

Location: Arlington, VA (Hybrid) Clearance: Clearance Capable / Eligible (U.S. Citizenship required)

Role Overview
We are seeking a Senior QA Automation Engineer to design, architect, and maintain comprehensive test automation frameworks and custom tooling for our cloud-native platforms. Operating across AWS Commercial and GovCloud (IL2-IL5) environments, you will ensure the reliability, security, and performance of complex microservices and data platforms deployed exclusively on Kubernetes and Docker.

Working in an AI-Native development ecosystem, you will champion automated quality by creating custom test harnesses in Python, orchestrating containerized test fixtures, and integrating autonomous AI agents into our verification pipelines for test generation, API fuzzing, and regression analysis.

Key Responsibilities

• Custom Test Framework Architecture: Architect and maintain scalable, customized test automation frameworks and CLI tools built in Python (pytest, custom runners, async HTTP/gRPC clients).
  
• Container & Kubernetes System Testing: Build automated end-to-end integration and system test suites executing directly against pure Docker and Kubernetes environments (AWS EKS), validating service discovery, networking, and resilience.
  
• API & Contract Verification: Implement automated contract, functional, and regression testing for REST, gRPC, and event-driven architectures (Kafka), verifying schema fidelity and backward compatibility.
  AI-Native Quality Engineering: Integrate AI agents and LLM tooling into the QA lifecycle to autonomously generate synthetic test datasets, discover edge cases, and produce automated test suites.
  
• CI/CD Integration & Gates: Embed automated test stages (smoke, integration, load, security) into GitLab CI pipelines, establishing automated quality gates that provide rapid feedback to engineering teams.
  Security & Compliance Automation: Collaborate with platform and security teams to automate security testing (SAST/DAST, container vulnerability scanning) and compliance validation aligned with DoD NIST 800-53 standards.

Required Technical Expertise

• Test Automation & Scripting: Advanced proficiency in Python for framework development, custom test harnesses, and CLI tooling (pytest, pydantic, requests/httpx, asyncio).
  
• Containers & Orchestration: Strong experience testing applications in pure Docker and Kubernetes environments, including automated provisioning of ephemeral test dependencies.
  
• API & Distributed Systems Testing: Deep knowledge of testing RESTful APIs, gRPC services, WebSocket connections, and asynchronous event streams.
  
• CI/CD & Developer Workflows: Experience with GitLab CI/CD pipelines, container registries, artifact management, and automated test reporting dashboards.
  
• AI Tooling & Testing Innovation: Familiarity with or strong interest in leveraging AI coding assistants and autonomous testing agents to accelerate QA cycles.

Qualifications

• 5-8+ years of dedicated software quality engineering and test automation experience.
  
• Clearance Requirement: U.S. Citizenship required. Must be capable of obtaining and maintaining a DoD security clearance (prior clearance history is not required).
  
• Proven track record building custom test automation frameworks and tooling from scratch in Python.
  
• Strong hands-on experience validating distributed applications deployed in pure Docker and Kubernetes environments.
  
• High autonomy as an Individual Contributor, capable of establishing quality standards and mentoring teams on automated testing best practices.