Playwright SDET

ONLY W2 (NO C2C/1099)Role: Platform Development Engineer in TestLocation: Houston, TX, Jersey City, NJ, Raleigh, NC, Remote Contract: 12 months (potential extension)Primary focusBuild a scalable test automation framework using software engineering principles Own end-to-end testing across platform and partner integrations Key skillsTest automation with a development mindset Playwright (preferred) API/contract testing AI-assisted test generation/execution Functional, performance, security, and integration testing Experience managing test code like production code Tools mentionedPlaywright Karate BlazeMeter Postman / OpenAPI contract validation Key expectationStrong coding skills applied to QA automation Focus on maintainability and scalable testing practices What you need to know Transforming our digital product offering across the insurance and retirement value chain. Our Acquisition team is delivering a next-generation platform for the submission and processing of new applications for our insurance and retirement products. This platform will help automate and reduce manual work to shorten the time to issue a new policy/contract to customers. The Platform Development Engineer in Test for the Acquisition Platform is a critical lead role focused on ensuring that platform capabilities meet functional and non‐functional expectations at scale. This role treats quality engineering and test automation as first‐class platform capabilities, embedded early in product design and continuously evolved alongside the platform. The role leverages AI‐assisted development techniques and emerging automation approaches to accelerate test creation, improve coverage, and validate performance, reliability, and resiliency characteristics of the platform as it evolves across products, channels, and integration partners. What we’re looking for Platform Test Strategy • Define and lead the test automation strategy for the Acquisition Platform, aligning with product and platform goals. • Establish contract testing practices across PBC (Packaged Business Capability) producers and consumers to prevent breaking changes in distributed platform services • Define service virtualization strategies for upstream and downstream dependencies to enable isolated testing when partner or internal systems are unavailable or under development • Design and manage test data strategies including synthetic data generation, masking, and lifecycle management to meet financial services data sensitivity requirements • Extend test coverage across platforms, browsers, devices, and responsive breakpoints to validate omnichannel delivery expectations Collaboration and Platform Alignment • Partner closely with Product, Platform Engineering, Integration, Experience, and SRE leads to align quality expectations. • Influence platform designs to improve testability, observability, and reliability. • Guide teams in implementing shift‐left testing and continuous quality practices. AI‐Assisted Quality Engineering • Direct teams in using AI‐assisted development techniques to accelerate test creation and maintenance. • Ensure AI tools are leveraged to improve coverage, generate test scenarios, identify gaps, and reduce manual effort. • Apply responsible AI practices with attention to security, data exposure, and operational risk. Implementation and Enablement • Guide teams in building and operating automated test frameworks and pipelines. • Establish standards, patterns, and tooling for quality engineering across the platform. • Mentor engineers and promote a culture of quality, accountability, and continuous improvement. Quality Governance and Measurement • Embed shift-left security testing into CI/CD pipelines, including SAST, DAST, dependency scanning, and secrets detection • Design test scenarios that verify regulatory and compliance requirements are met across acquisition workflows • Define and track test effectiveness metrics including coverage ratios, defect escape rates, automation ROI, and trend analysis to continuously improve the quality program Technical Skills and Competencies • Test automation frameworks for APIs, UI, and distributed systems • Non‐functional testing including performance, resiliency, failover, and reliability validation • AI‐assisted testing techniques and prompt‐driven automation • CI/CD pipeline integration and automated quality gates • Observability‐driven testing using logs, metrics, and traces • Cloud‐native testing in containerized and event‐driven architectures • Strong communication skills and product‐oriented mindset Required Experience • 7+ years of experience building or governing test data strategies in regulated environments • Expertise with contract testing in distributed or microservices architectures • Experience embedding security and accessibility testing into CI/CD pipelines • Direct experience with Agile and product‐centric delivery models • Experience guiding and mentoring engineers on quality practices • Enterprise‐scale delivery experience with distributed teams Preferred • Experience in financial services, insurance, or retirement services industry • Experience with chaos engineering tools (e.g., AWS Fault Injection Simulator, Gremlin, LitmusChaos) • Familiarity with BDD/TDD frameworks (e.g., Cucumber, SpecFlow) to align test scenarios with business language • Cloud experience across AWS services and modern DevOps toolchains • Experience integrating testing with observability and SRE practicesEEO- “Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment based on – Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.”