Quality Assurance Engineer

Talon Hiring Solutions has a client in the greater Birmingham, AL area that is seeking a hands-on Quality Assurance Engineer to serve as the independent quality gate for customer-facing applications. This role will validate stories, features, and bug fixes against acceptance criteria and the organization's Definition of Done, combining automated testing with risk-based manual and exploratory testing. What You'll Do Serve as the independent quality gate for customer-facing applications, accepting or rejecting work items based on defined quality standards. Collaborate with Product Owners, developers, and stakeholders to refine requirements and ensure work items meet the Definition of Ready before development begins. Validate features, enhancements, and bug fixes against business requirements, acceptance criteria, and the Definition of Done. Develop test plans and execute functional, regression, negative, boundary, end-to-end, exploratory, and risk-based testing. Own and manage the QA environment, including promoting builds from Development to QA for validation. Review automated test coverage and results to identify gaps, regressions, and quality risks. Leverage approved AI/agentic workflows to support test planning, requirements analysis, exploratory testing, investigation, and documentation. Perform hands-on manual testing of critical workflows across web, mobile, and Windows applications. Investigate legacy applications and unfamiliar functionality, even when documentation or automated coverage is limited. Document defects with clear reproduction steps, supporting evidence, and actionable details for development teams. Utilize automated UI and API testing to validate application functionality and reduce regression risk. Participate in Agile meetings, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. Collaborate with development teams throughout the SDLC while maintaining an independent perspective on quality. Raise quality concerns when requirements are not satisfied and confidently block acceptance when necessary. What You'll Bring 3+ years of hands-on software QA experience or equivalent demonstrated capability. Experience working in an Agile, sprint-based SDLC environment. Demonstrated experience independently testing customer-facing web, mobile, and Windows applications . Strong knowledge of functional, exploratory, regression, negative, boundary, and risk-based testing. Ability to translate requirements and acceptance criteria into effective test cases and testing strategies. Experience making and defending evidence-based accept/reject decisions . Experience using AI coding agents or strong aptitude for incorporating AI-assisted/agentic workflows into QA practices. Ability to investigate unfamiliar, complex, or poorly documented legacy applications. Strong defect documentation skills with clear, reproducible, and actionable reporting. Working knowledge of SPA web applications, REST APIs, relational databases, and modern identity management . Familiarity with automated UI testing frameworks such as Playwright . Experience with API testing tools such as Bruno or Postman . Experience using browser developer tools for network, console, and client-side troubleshooting. Experience testing mobile applications. Working knowledge of Azure DevOps, Git, and CI/CD test results . Strong written communication, critical thinking, organization, and time-management skills. Confidence to challenge assumptions, raise quality concerns, and block acceptance when quality or requirements are not met . #J-18808-Ljbffr