IT Software Engineer 4 (Senior SDET)
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Compensation: $90–$97 per hour (W2)
Benefits: Medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and standard contractor benefits
Assignment Type: 12?month contract
Work Model: Hybrid (3 days onsite per week, transitioning to full onsite)
Worksite: 540 W Madison Street, Chicago, IL
About the Role
- Supports a large enterprise software engineering organization with a strong focus on test automation, quality engineering, and system integration testing
- Best described as a Senior SDET rather than a general software engineer
- Owns and extends existing test automation frameworks
- Partners closely with product owners and development teams to ensure high?quality delivery across complex, integrated software platforms
- Starts in a hybrid model with a future transition to full?time onsite
Team and Assignment Structure
- Part of a 20+ person engineering and quality organization
- Embedded within an Agile product delivery team
- Works closely with:
- Software engineers
- Product owners
- QA engineers (onshore and offshore)
- New headcount supporting ongoing platform development and quality initiatives
- Enterprise environment with CI/CD pipelines and distributed systems
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain test automation frameworks supporting CI/CD pipelines
- Extend existing automation frameworks using Java and JavaScript
- Develop automated functional and integration tests using:
- Java
- Cucumber or other BDD frameworks
- Karate
- JMeter
- Own test strategy and test planning by translating business requirements and acceptance criteria into automated test coverage
- Plan, design, and maintain API test automation frameworks
- Execute and analyze automated regression, integration, and performance test suites
- Perform exploratory and manual testing as needed
- Lead end?to?end system and third?party integration testing efforts
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to test engineers across multiple applications
- Collaborate with product owners to clarify requirements, resolve defects, and support enhancements
- Promote testing best practices, standards, and quality methodologies across the team
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
- 8–10 years of experience in software testing and automation
- 8+ years of experience designing and building test automation frameworks
- Strong hands?on experience with Java?based test automation
- Experience with BDD frameworks such as Cucumber or JBehave
- Strong experience testing RESTful web services and APIs
- Proven experience developing test scripts, test cases, and test data
- Ability to write SQL queries against relational databases
- 3+ years of performance testing experience using JMeter
- Experience with full?stack, integration, and third?party system testing
- Strong communication skills and ability to work independently in an onsite enterprise environment
Technical Skills
- Java
- Cucumber and other BDD frameworks
- REST API testing
- SQL
- JMeter (performance and load testing)
- CI/CD concepts and pipelines
- End?to?end system integration testing
- Agile and Lean development practices
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands?on experience with Python
- Exposure to AWS cloud environments
- Experience with:
- TDD
- CI/CD pipelines
- Jenkins
- Git
- Experience with API gateways such as Apigee
- Understanding of microservices architecture
- Strong documentation and technical writing skills
Soft Skills
- Ability to adapt quickly in a complex enterprise environment
- Proactive, flexible, and solution?oriented mindset
- Strong collaboration skills with developers and business stakeholders
- Mentorship and leadership capabilities within QA and engineering teams
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