Overview
Cognizant is looking for a Lead Quality Assurance Engineer to be part of a highly dynamic team developing our next generation Global Trade Management application suite. Our engineers come from a broad range of backgrounds and experience levels, united by a shared drive to build exceptional software. Successful candidates will typically:
Be passionate about software quality and its role in delivering real customer value.
Think beyond test cases, they understand the product, the domain, and the user.
Measure success by the absence of production incidents, not the volume of tests written.
Have a natural curiosity that drives them to ask "why" before "how."
Take ownership of quality across the entire SDLC, not just the test phase.
Leverage an agentic AI-First approach to all testing and quality operations.
Key Responsibilities
Own quality outcomes for one or more product domains end-to-end from requirements through production monitoring.
Drive a shift-left quality culture by embedding testing strategy and risk analysis early in the design and decomposition process.
Lead the design, development, and maintenance of automated test frameworks across UI, API, and data layers.
Leverage agentic AI-First tooling to accelerate test generation, coverage analysis, defect triage, and root cause investigation.
Define and enforce testing standards, patterns, and best practices across the QA team.
Conduct test design reviews and provide constructive feedback to QA engineers.
Mentor junior QA engineers, reinforcing best practices and supporting their professional growth.
Collaborate closely with developers, product owners, and stakeholders to deeply understand business intent and translate it into comprehensive test strategies.
Analyze system behavior holistically. Identify edge cases, integration risks, and failure modes that others miss.
Contribute to observability and monitoring strategies, ensuring production quality signals are in place (DataDog, RUM, APM).
Ensure all quality activities are properly estimated and delivered to agreed timeframes and quality standards.
Champion continuous improvement of the team's quality processes, tooling, and delivery pipeline.
Leverage "innovation time" to explore new testing approaches, tools, and automation strategies.
Minimum Requirements
5+ years of experience in software quality engineering within the Global Trade industry, specifically in logistics, customs, or supply chain management.
10+ years of overall software quality engineering experience across diverse tech stacks and application types.
Proven ability to think at the system and domain level showing understanding of how components interact and where risk lives, not just executing test cases.
3+ years of hands-on experience using agentic AI-First development and testing tools and processes.
Strong proficiency in test automation across UI, API, and data layers using modern frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, RestAssured, or equivalent).
Proficiency in testing REST APIs, including tooling such as Swagger and Postman.
Experience testing applications built on .NET (C#, VB.NET) and Angular front-end frameworks.
Experience validating both SQL and NoSQL data persistence layers (MSSQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB).
Working knowledge of DataDog for observability, APM, and RUM from a quality and monitoring perspective.
Experience with AWS and/or GCP cloud-native application testing.
Comfort with iterative, spec-light delivery. You will not receive a full spec upfront and will need to think things through, fill in the blanks, and adapt your testing strategy across sprints as the product evolves.
A firm understanding of application security testing from both the web service and web application perspective.
Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills with a relentless drive to find root cause.
Strong communication and collaboration skills. Able to clearly articulate quality risk and status to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
SaaS-based software quality engineering experience on large to enterprise-class applications.
Desired Skills
Deep intellectual curiosity. Naturally drawn to understanding how things work and why they break.
Ability to think in systems: anticipate downstream impacts, integration failures, and user-facing risks before they materialize.
Strong understanding of CS fundamentals and how to apply them to test design and automation architecture.
Ability to translate business requirements and regulatory constraints into comprehensive test coverage strategies.
Champions quality as a team sport. Influences developers and product owners to share accountability for quality outcomes.
Drives innovation and continuous improvement in testing tooling, processes, and coverage.
Energetic self-starter who thrives in a team-oriented environment and can clearly articulate daily progress, coverage gaps, and blocking issues.
Demonstrated history of excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
Demonstrated history of good decision-making, conflict resolution, and follow-through.
Strong written and oral communication skills.
Technologies
C#.NET, VB.NET, JavaScript, ASP.NET, Angular, SOAP, REST, AWS Cloud, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Kibana, PowerBI, Playwright, Selenium, Postman, DataDog
Team Structure
You will work on a team of approximately 10 staff, consisting of 6–7 developers and 3–4 QA engineers.
Business Travel: Not required
Work Location: Hybrid, 3 days a week in office
