Senior Software Engineer in Test

Salary: $153,000 - $171,000 a year

Employment Type: Full-time

About Nava

Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple, effective, and accessible to all. Since 2013, federal, state, and local government agencies have trusted Nava to build transformative digital services to help people access public benefits. Meeting our mission is an opportunity to restore trust between people and public institutions. We focus on populations that are the least protected because the stakes are higher.

As a client services company, we work with government agencies to improve how people apply for benefits, navigate their health care, and more. We bill for our time, selling our expertise and problem-solving methodology to government clients. Our clients hire us to help improve their products and services so that their users and beneficiaries have a better customer experience.

These end-users—the humans who benefit from our work—are at the core of everything we do. We research beneficiaries’ needs to help our government clients better deliver on their missions, providing everyone at Nava opportunities to do meaningful, impactful work.

Position Summary

The Senior Software Engineer in Test will be responsible for shaping and overseeing the testing strategy and day-to-day operation for a large modernization effort, including the architecting and writing of automated tests. You will play a key role in ensuring the delivery of high-quality, reliable software by leading a team of testers and building out test automation capabilities.

What you'll do

• Define and execute the testing strategy for a complex, multi-phase modernization effort, aligned with overall project goals and delivery timelines.
• Lead the development of test automation frameworks and pipelines, enabling continuous testing as part of the CI/CD process.
• Build, lead, and mentor a cross-functional testing team, providing day-to-day guidance, support, and performance feedback.
• Establish test processes and best practices, including test planning, test case design, test execution, defect tracking, and reporting.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, product, and program teams to align on requirements, define acceptance criteria, and ensure test coverage.
• Oversee both functional and non-functional testing (e.g., performance, security, regression), ensuring that all quality gates are met.
• Develop and track quality metrics, regularly reporting test progress, defect trends, and overall readiness.
• Support UAT and stakeholder validation activities, coordinating across multiple business and technical teams.
• Stay current on testing tools and industry trends, and recommend innovations that improve efficiency and quality outcomes.

Required skills

• Experience managing a team of testers and mentoring junior QA engineers.
• Must have lead experience on projects.
• At least 2 years coding in Javascript.
• Ability to develop testing strategy, define testing processes, introduce best practices, and advocate for test automation.
• Experience with defining and executing test plans and test cases for complex enterprise applications.
• Strong skills in tracking, reporting, and prioritizing defects using tools like Jira, Github project.
• Experience with a mix of automation tools such as: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, JUnit, or other automation frameworks.
• Knowledge of performance testing tools.
• Experience leading regression, UAT, and E2E testing.

Desired skills

• Ability to write in Python

Other requirements

All roles at Nava require the following:

• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States and meet any other requirements for government contracts for which they are hired.
• Candidates offered a job at Nava must have work authorization that does not require visa sponsorship, either currently or in the future. Please be aware that most of our positions require U.S. citizenship or a green card.
• May be subject to a government security investigation.