About the Role

We are looking for a Sr. QA Automation Engineer who will serve as the first dedicated QA engineer on the team and the technical owner of our quality ecosystem. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role responsible for defining the strategy, building the foundations, and driving adoption of a unified automation and quality platform across the organization.

The ideal candidate is a strong self-starter with deep experience establishing QA automation frameworks, building scalable quality tooling, and creating standards that multiple engineering teams can follow. You’ll partner closely with product, engineering leadership, and individual software teams to ensure quality is baked into the entire development lifecycle — not bolted on at the end.

This role requires exceptional communication and collaboration skills, as multiple engineering teams currently maintain their own QA tooling. Your mission is to build shared systems, guide teams through the migration process, and establish quality dashboards and visibility that leadership can depend on for informed decision-making.

What You’ll Do

Quality Platform Ownership

• Architect, implement, and maintain a unified QA automation platform that scales across multiple services and engineering teams.
• Define the long-term quality strategy, including tooling, frameworks, conventions, and automation standards.
• Evaluate existing team-specific QA solutions and drive the organization-wide migration to the centralized platform.

Quality Practices & Standards

• Lead the creation and documentation of QA best practices, covering automation, manual testing, regression suites, contract testing, API/UI testing, and more.
• Partner closely with engineering and product teams early in the SDLC to ensure appropriate testability, quality requirements, and automation criteria are established from the beginning.
• Ensure CI/CD pipelines have the proper gates, coverage, and automation hooks that enable reliable deployments.

Cross-Team Collaboration & Leadership

• Work with engineering leads to prioritize and deliver quality tooling that meets team-specific and organizational needs.
• Regularly align with product managers, engineering managers, and technical leaders to ensure quality initiatives support roadmap goals.
• Serve as the go-to expert and mentor for automated testing, guiding engineers on best practices and reviewing test automation contributions.

Metrics, Visibility & Reporting

• Build and maintain quality dashboards that give engineering teams and leadership real-time insights into application health, test coverage, defect trends, stability, and release readiness.
• Define KPIs and quality measurements used to track progress and drive continuous improvement.
• Communicate risks, gaps, and recommendations clearly and proactively.

What We’re Looking For

Required Experience

• Proven experience establishing a QA automation platform or quality engineering program from the ground up.
• Deep technical expertise building and scaling automation frameworks (API, UI, performance, contract testing, etc.).
• Strong understanding of SDLC, quality fundamentals, and test strategies for modern distributed/event-driven architectures.
• Experience building quality dashboards using tools such as Datadog, Grafana, Looker, or custom solutions.
• Hands-on experience integrating automation into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred).
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills—comfortable influencing and aligning diverse engineering teams with differing priorities.
• Strong self-starter with the ability to identify gaps, propose solutions, and drive execution with minimal oversight.
• 5+ years of experience developing and supporting production-grade, event-driven web applications.
• Strong proficiency in Elixir and the Phoenix framework (experience with LiveView is a significant plus).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, message-driven architectures, and data consistency models.
• Familiarity with AWS services (e.g., Lambda, S3, RDS, ECS/EKS) and modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience designing and maintaining RESTful or GraphQL APIs.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a passion for delivering clean, well-tested software.
• Self-starter with the ability to drive technical initiatives with minimal direction.

Bonus Skills

• Experience with Elixir/Phoenix or event-driven architectures.
• Experience setting quality standards in a microservices or service-oriented environment.
• Experience working with cloud-native systems (AWS preferred).

The salary range for this position is $124,000 - $155,000, which represents base pay only and does not include short-term or long-term incentive compensation.  When determining base pay, as part of a final compensation package, we consider several factors such as location, experience, qualifications, and training.

Ensure your Fanatics job offer is legitimate and don’t fall victim to fraud. Fanatics never seeks payment from job applicants. Feel free to ask your recruiter for a phone call or other type of communication for interview, and ensure your communication is coming from a Fanatics email address (including @collectfanatics.com). For added security, where possible, apply through our company website at www.fanaticsinc.com/careers