Quality Assurance Engineer

We are currently recruiting for a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer with 5 + years of experience in Frederick, MD (hybrid schedule). This will begin as a 6-month contract with the possibility of extension. The QA Engineer will own, execute, and drive technical release validation, automated regression coverage, pipeline validation, environment readiness checks, and code QA for vendor-supplied releases across internal IT teams, external support partners, and vendors. $45-55 Hourly rate. All candidates must be a US citizen or green card holder / permanent resident. No sponsorship available.

Responsibilities:

• Own, execute, and drive IT and DevOps-focused QA activities for enterprise applications technical releases, environment changes, and deployment activities across internal teams, external support partners, and vendors.
• Support the engineering projects by validating environment readiness, deployment paths, integration points, monitoring, logging, security scan evidence, backup and restore readiness, and operational acceptance criteria.
• Provide QA coverage: including release regression, smoke testing, incident-related retesting, post-deployment validation, and production stability support.
• Validate vendor-supplied releases by reviewing release notes, deployment packages, known issues, defect fixes, test evidence, code QA artifacts, and release readiness documentation.
• Own the technical code QA process for vendor-supplied releases, ensuring that quality gates, deployment artifacts, scan outputs, pipeline approvals, defect evidence, and test results are complete and traceable.
• Design, maintain, and execute automated smoke, regression, integration, and deployment validation test suites.
• Develop and maintain automated tests using tools such as Puppeteer and Selenium and recommend improvements to automation coverage where appropriate.
• Validate Azure DevOps pipelines, release stages, build artifacts, deployment logs, environment approvals, rollback readiness, and promotion controls.
• Lead coordination across DevOps, cloud engineering, database, application support, security, release management, vendor, external support, and operational teams to identify, triage, retest, and close technical defects.
• Maintain audit-ready QA documentation, including test plans, test cases, test execution results, defect evidence, release validation summaries, change evidence, and approval support materials.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline preferred.
• 5+ years of experience in IT quality assurance, DevOps QA, software quality engineering, technical testing, release assurance, or a similar role in a complex enterprise environment. Test automation frameworks, preferably Puppeteer and Selenium.
• Hands-on experience creating, maintaining, and executing automated tests using Selenium, Puppeteer, or comparable automation tooling.
• Demonstrated experience owning and driving QA planning, execution, defect management, release validation, and technical sign-off activities across internal IT teams, external support teams, managed service providers, and vendors.
• Azure-hosted application environments, including virtual machines, SQL Managed Instance or SQL Server, Redis, load balancing, monitoring tools, and deployment automation.
• Change management, release management, incident management, defect management, and audit evidence expectations.
• Experience validating vendor-supplied code, deployment packages, release notes, defect fixes, test evidence, and release readiness documentation.
• Ability to interpret pipeline logs, deployment output, test results, scan summaries, defect reports, and change implementation evidence.

Certifications Preferred:

ISTQB, Certified Software Tester, or equivalent QA certification.

Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, DevOps Foundation, or equivalent cloud and DevOps certification.

Security, compliance, or IT service management certification such as CompTIA Security+, ITIL Foundation, or equivalent is helpful but not required.

Local candidates only. Must be in a commutable range to Frederick, MD office (Hybrid). All candidates must be a US citizen or green card holder / permanent resident. No sponsorship available. $45-$55 Hourly Rate (6 month+ contract)