Sr Software Engineer in Test

POSITION SUMMARY:

Are you ready to make a real impact on people's lives and be a part of a rapidly-growing team? Natera is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Test to help own the quality strategy for our commercial services, a critical backend microservice ecosystem that powers our business operations. As a senior member of our engineering team, you will play a key role in driving test architecture, automation coverage, and release confidence across our order processing systems, mentoring other quality engineers, and helping to positively impact patient outcomes. Join us in our mission to change the way disease is managed, and be a part of a team of dedicated professionals who are passionate about making a difference.

Senior Software Engineer in Test, Commercial Services is responsible for leading test strategy, driving best practices in test automation, and owning end-to-end quality across microservices that handle sales order processing and management. Our services span many upstream and downstream platforms, so proven multi-service, cross-platform test experience is essential. Strong hands-on skills in Java, Playwright, and event-driven system testing are required.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Lead test strategy and quality architecture across the order processing domain, from unit tests through service-level, contract, and end-to-end coverage.
• Design, build, and maintain the automation frameworks, test infrastructure, and test data strategy that support rapid, reliable release cycles.
• Own end-to-end test coverage that spans multiple services and platforms in our ecosystem, coordinating flows that cross service boundaries, event streams, and UI surfaces.
• Work closely with Product Managers and engineers to gather requirements, review designs for testability, define acceptance criteria, and identify risk early in the software lifecycle.
• Own contract testing between our services and their consumers, regression suites, and non-functional testing including performance, load, and resilience.
• Partner with QA and engineering peers to continuously raise the quality bar, improve release confidence, and reduce escaped defects.
• This role works with PHI on a regular basis both in paper and electronic form and has access to various technologies to access PHI (paper and electronic) in order to perform the job.
• Employee must complete training relating to HIPAA/PHI privacy, General Policies and Procedure Compliance training and security training as soon as possible but not later than the first 30 days of hire.
• Must maintain a current status on Natera training requirements.
• Employee must pass post offer criminal background check.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• 5+ years of software test engineering / SDET experience with production-grade coding skills in Java.
• BS degree in Computer Science or equivalent work experience.
• Strong experience testing event-driven systems using Apache Kafka, including producer and consumer contract tests, event replay, and idempotency validation.
• Proven experience designing end-to-end test coverage across many services and platforms in a heterogeneous ecosystem, where flows cross service, event, and UI boundaries.
• Hands-on experience with Playwright for browser-based end-to-end automation.
• Extensive experience with Test-Driven Development and Behavior-Driven Development, including contract testing using tools such as Pact or Spring Cloud Contract.
• Experience building and maintaining CI test pipelines including flakiness triage, parallelization, and test result reporting.
• Extensive knowledge of AI processes and procedures related to SDLC, with particular emphasis on AI-assisted test generation, flaky-test triage, and log analysis.
• Strong knowledge of QA methodologies, test planning, system dependencies, and product integration phases.
• Experience working with remote and hybrid teams including overseas contractors.
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical best practices.
• Experience with software development lifecycle processes including building, software configuration, releases, and deployment activities.
• Experience with service-oriented and microservice architecture.
• Experience testing software within the AWS ecosystem (EC2, Lambda, SQS, SNS, S3, etc.).
• Experience with GraphQL API testing, including schema and contract validation.
• Strong relational database skills, with emphasis on test data management and validation strategy.
• Demonstrated leadership skills with a solid analytical background.
• Excellent organizational, communication, presentation, and facilitation skills.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES:

• Quality-first mindset with a bias toward automation, prevention, and shift-left.
• Advanced Java programming for building and extending test frameworks.
• Test tooling stack: JUnit, Mockito, Testcontainers, RestAssured or Karate, WireMock, Playwright, Cucumber, Gatling or k6, Pact.
• Multi-service, multi-platform end-to-end test coordination across a heterogeneous stack.
• SQL and NoSQL experience (MySQL, ElasticSearch, DynamoDB), applied to validation and test data management.
• Test data management strategy, particularly for regulated data.
• AWS services for test environments and validation.
• Docker and container-oriented technologies.
• Apache Kafka for event streaming and event-driven test scenarios.
• GraphQL API testing.
• Microservice architecture.
• CI / CD (Gitlab).
• Claude / Cursor, MCPs, AI Agents, Skills, and other AI-assisted testing workflows.
• Strong knowledge of Linux and command line shell scripting.
• Familiarity with the Spring ecosystem (Spring Data, Spring Security, etc.) sufficient to read and extend service code.
• Experience with distributed systems monitoring and observability tooling (Datadog, tracing) to diagnose failures in both test and production.