Software Quality Assurance Engineer

Golden Gate Innovations is a leading provider of AI-driven technology solutions designed specifically for high-growth startups in Silicon Valley. The company specializes in transforming innovative concepts into scalable, high-performance products by leveraging advanced AI, engineering simulations, intelligent automation, and cybersecurity engineering. With expertise spanning AI and machine learning, optimized engineering modeling, secure product development, and robust cloud and web infrastructure, Golden Gate Innovations empowers startups to accelerate innovation, enhance security, and improve operational efficiency. The team thrives in a fast-paced, collaborative environment that encourages continuous learning and impact-driven problem solving.

Key Responsibilities
As a Software Quality Assurance Engineer, you will play a critical role in ensuring the reliability, performance, and security of software products delivered to clients. Your daily tasks will include designing and executing manual test plans and test cases, identifying and documenting defects, and working closely with software developers to resolve issues and enhance overall product quality. You will participate in requirements reviews, validate new features against specifications, and contribute to release readiness through thorough regression testing and quality reporting. Additionally, you will help refine quality standards, propose process improvements, and support continuous integration and delivery pipelines to maintain high-quality releases across AI-driven and cloud-based solutions.

Required Qualifications
- 1–2 years of QA experience with web applications, including internships and contract roles.
- Strong understanding of manual testing fundamentals such as test case design, boundary and negative testing, role and permission testing, and regression strategies.
- Proficiency in Python sufficient to read and extend existing codebases independently.
- Practical experience with UI automation frameworks like Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress, including locator strategies and wait handling.
- Comfortable using browser developer tools (network tab, console, DOM inspection) to identify stable selectors.
- Basic API testing skills using Postman or equivalent tools, with the ability to interpret JSON responses and status codes.
- Experience testing ETL/data pipelines, including validating extraction, transformation, and load stages, reconciling source and destination data, and detecting silent data loss.
- Familiarity with Git fundamentals such as branching, committing, opening pull requests, and resolving simple conflicts.
- Experience working with bug tracking tools (preferably Jira) and within an Agile sprint environment.
- Clear and precise written English communication skills, essential for accurately describing issues to facilitate resolution.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Experience testing AI or large language model (LLM)-powered features, including prompt evaluation and handling non-deterministic outputs.
- Knowledge of async/await in Python or experience with asynchronous test frameworks.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, particularly GitHub Actions, including reading workflow logs and test artifacts.
- SQL skills for verifying data integrity behind user interfaces.
- Exposure to performance or load testing tools such as k6, JMeter, or Locust.
- Previous work experience in regulated, document-heavy domains like legal tech, insurance, or healthcare.
- Basic understanding of security testing concepts, including authentication boundaries, role escalation, and input validation.

Tech Stack
Python 3, Playwright (async), Pytest, GitHub Actions, Next.js, Node/Express, Flask, PostgreSQL, Redis/BullMQ, Qdrant, OpenAI, Sentry, Jira, Postman.

This role offers the opportunity to contribute to cutting-edge AI and cloud-based solutions in a dynamic startup environment, supporting continuous innovation and quality assurance excellence.