Lead Software Engineer in Test

Lead Software Engineer in Test

Los Angeles, CA; Nashville, TN; New York City, NY; Portland, OR; Remote

CD Baby — Platform Team

About Us

CD Baby is a globally recognized leader in the music industry and the first platform to offer artists direct distribution to their fans. Our technology organization has a deep history and a strong foundation, built by long-tenured, dedicated professionals. As we navigate the next era of music technology, we are committed to modernizing our core systems, fostering an agile culture, and leveraging cutting-edge platforms to better serve our artists, partners, and fans worldwide.

The Role

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer in Test to be the senior-most quality voice on CD Baby's flagship customer-facing software: the members application our artists use to distribute their music, get paid, and understand their audiences, and the.com marketing site that brings new artists into the platform. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with broad technical authority over how we test — the engineer who treats quality as a software engineering discipline and builds the practice to prove it.

In the near term, you will help carry our customer-facing platform across the finish line for a brand relaunch worthy of CD Baby — standing up the automated coverage, the test data, and the CI/CD gates that let us ship with confidence. Beyond launch, your defining mandate is to architect our testing practice from the ground up: choose the frameworks, build the suites, integrate them into our delivery pipeline, and make automated, AI-augmented testing a first-class capability of the team as our customer-facing stack evolves from a .NET monolith into a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture.

This is a role for an engineer who is energized by both the discipline of writing the code that proves our software works every day, and the craft of designing a testing program that scales with the platform underneath it.

What You'll Own

Testing Strategy & Practice

• Define and drive the multi-year evolution of CD Baby's automated testing practice — from a nascent Playwright-based program today to a comprehensive, AI-augmented testing capability that scales as our architecture moves from monolith to services.
• Choose the right tools for each layer of the test pyramid: UI/end-to-end (currently Playwright), API and contract testing, integration testing across our third-party API seams (FUGA, Zendesk, Trolley, and others integral to our operations), and performance and load testing. Bring a clear point of view on what to use, why, and how it fits together.
• Design and own the CI/CD test integration. Our pipeline runs on ArgoCD; you will define how tests gate every release, what runs where, how fast feedback loops are kept fast, and how the suite earns trust over time.
• Establish test data strategy, environment management, and the engineering patterns that keep tests reliable as the surface area grows.

Building the Test Suite

• Own the test suite for the entire flagship application. The primary job here is writing the code — the tests, the fixtures, the helpers, the harnesses — that proves the member application and the .com marketing site work as our customers expect, release after release.
• Cover the.NET monolith we operate today, the Next.js front end, and the new services as they emerge. Build coverage that travels with the architecture rather than fighting it.
• Treat usability and stability as first-class quality concerns alongside functional correctness. Our interfaces must be intuitive, accessible, and dependable; your tests should help us prove all three.
• Use AI aggressively as a force multiplier. Drive AI-assisted test authoring, suite generation, and maintenance so that one senior engineer can credibly cover the full surface area of a complex product. We expect the toolchain you build to look meaningfully different from a traditional QA program because of how you apply AI.

Cross-Functional Team Craft

• Embed on a cross-functional Platform team alongside front end engineers, back end engineers, a data engineer, a designer, and a product manager. We share ownership over outcomes for our users — quality is the team's job, and your job is to make sure the team is equipped to do it well.
• Participate in agile ceremonies as the customer and quality voice in the room. Bring a QA lens to story refinement: what could break, what the edge cases are, what "done" really means. Then implement the automated tests that ship with each story.
• Be the catcher on the field — the engineer who sees the whole game, anticipates what's coming, and quietly guides the team toward better outcomes. Mentor by example: through the quality of your tests, the clarity of your reviews, and your willingness to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with another engineer when something is hard.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a deep specialization in test automation, or equivalent experience as a Senior/Staff/Lead SDET, SET, or Quality Engineer at companies that treat testing as an engineering discipline.
• Demonstrated track record of architecting a testing practice from early stage to mature — selecting frameworks, building suites, integrating them into CI/CD, and earning the trust of the engineering organization over time.
• Phenomenal hands-on coding ability. You write production-quality code, and your tests look like production code: well-factored, well-named, easy to maintain, and built to last.
• Strong experience with Playwright (or comparable modern end-to-end frameworks such as Cypress or Selenium) and a clear point of view on when and how to use them.
• Deep experience with API testing and contract testing, including testing the seams between your application and critical third-party APIs. You know how to mock, stub, and record/replay responsibly, and when each is appropriate.
• Experience designing and running performance and load testing programs, with the judgment to choose the right tooling for the workload (k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust, etc.).
• Hands-on experience applying AI to testing workflows — AI-assisted test authoring, suite generation, self-healing tests, AI-driven coverage analysis, or comparable approaches. You are fluent with modern AI coding tools and treat them as core to your craft.
• Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. Familiarity with ArgoCD, Kubernetes, and containerized test environments is a plus; the ability to learn our specific stack quickly is required.
• Working knowledge of the .NET and Next.js ecosystems sufficient to read and reason about the code you are testing. You don't need to be a .NET expert; you do need to be comfortable in the codebase.
• A clear point of view on accessibility (WCAG) and usability testing, and the experience to back it up.
• Excellent communication. You can explain a coverage gap, a flaky test, or a release risk to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision.

Skills & Competencies

• Quality as Engineering: You treat testing as a software engineering discipline. Everything is code, everything is reviewable, everything belongs in the pipeline.
• AI Fluency: You use AI as a force multiplier across your work and have strong opinions about where it adds real leverage and where it doesn't.
• Architectural Thinking: You design test architectures that match the systems they cover — simple where the system is simple, layered where it is layered, evolvable where it must evolve.
• Pragmatic Bar-Raising: You raise the quality bar without becoming a bottleneck. You know when to write the test, when to teach the engineer to write it, and when to let it ship.
• Mentorship by Example: You raise the people around you through the quality of your work, the clarity of your reviews, and your willingness to dig into a hard bug alongside the engineer who wrote the code.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: You partner naturally with engineering, product, design, data, and DevSecOps, and you treat those partnerships as core to the work rather than adjacent to it.
• Customer-Centric Mindset: Relentless focus on the artist experience. You think about usability, accessibility, and stability the way the customer would — because in the end, that's what your tests are protecting.
• Clear Communication: You can articulate risk, coverage, and trade-offs to engineers, product partners,