QA Engineer/ SDET

Company Description

Comfort Connect®, based in Bethesda, Maryland, is a leading financial technology platform that revolutionizes the home comfort industry across the United States. Serving HVAC, plumbing, and standby generator contractors, we provide a comprehensive point-of-sale (POS) solution with financing tools, sales programs, and marketing support to help contractors grow their businesses. As the creators of the Premier Program®, we offer a unique, all-inclusive home comfort solution, delivering high-efficiency equipment, installation, maintenance, and repair for predictable monthly payments. Our platform promotes sustainability by replacing outdated systems with energy-efficient upgrades, supporting long-term environmental benefits while fostering lasting customer relationships.

We are a fast-growing FinTech organization building a mission-critical Point of Sale (POS) platform. Technology is at the core of our business—software quality, reliability, and performance directly impact revenue. Our platform consists of multiple homegrown applications and services built using modern cloud-native technologies.

Current stack includes (but is not limited to):

• Frontend: React
• Backend: Node.js, Express
• Cloud & Infra: AWS (EC2, DynamoDB), Postgres, Snowflake
• Auth & Security: Auth0
• AI & Automation: OpenAI and Anthropic APIs
• DevOps & Collaboration: GitHub

We move fast, ship often, and operate in a high-ownership environment where engineering decisions matter.

The Role

We are looking for a QA Engineer / SDET to own quality across our entire platform — origination, servicing, billing, and partner integrations. This is not a manual testing role. You will build and maintain automated test frameworks, define quality gates in CI/CD, and be the person who catches what everyone else misses. You report directly to the Head of Technology and operate as an independent quality function.

Responsibilities

• Own the test automation strategy end-to-end — frameworks, tooling, coverage, and execution
• Build and maintain automated regression suites across web (and eventually mobile) surfaces
• Define and enforce quality gates in CI/CD pipelines — nothing ships without passing your bar
• Write integration and end-to-end tests for origination workflows, billing logic, and partner API integrations
• Identify, document, and track defects with clear reproduction steps and severity classification
• Perform exploratory testing on new features — think like a comfort advisor at the kitchen table, not like an engineer
• Collaborate daily with the engineering team on sprint work while maintaining independence on quality standards
• Monitor production for regressions and anomalies — be the early warning system
• Contribute to test data management and environment stability
• Report quality metrics to the Head of Technology — defect trends, coverage gaps, release readiness

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in software quality engineering with a strong focus on test automation
• Hands-on proficiency with modern test frameworks — Playwright, Cypress, Detox, or equivalent
• Experience writing automated tests for full-stack web applications (API + UI)
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines and how to integrate automated tests into build and deploy workflows
• Ability to write clean, maintainable test code — you are an engineer who happens to focus on quality, not a manual tester who learned to script
• Experience testing complex business logic — financial calculations, multi-step workflows, state machines
• Comfortable working with REST APIs, databases, and reading application code to understand what you’re testing
• Strong communication skills — you can explain a defect’s business impact, not just its technical symptoms

Preferred

• Experience in fintech, lending, or financial services — you understand why a rounding error in billing is not a minor bug
• Background testing B2B2C platforms where the end user is a field sales rep, not a developer
• Experience with performance and load testing tools
• Familiarity with mobile testing frameworks (Detox, Appium) — mobile is on the roadmap
• Experience testing third-party integrations (payment processors, lending partners, notification services)
• Exposure to compliance or regulatory testing requirements in financial services

This Role Is Not For You If

• You see QA as a gate at the end of a sprint rather than a discipline woven through the entire process
• You rely primarily on manual testing and treat automation as a nice-to-have
• You need someone to hand you test cases — we need you to define them
• You’re not comfortable pushing back on engineers (including senior ones) when quality isn’t there

Location

• Our HQ in Bethesda, MD