QA and Test Engineer Role

About OPEN Data Jobs

OPEN Data Jobs (ODJ) is built to craft data careers. We connect high-potential data, AI, and software professionals with meaningful work on the cutting edge of the federal sector, and our aim reaches beyond any single opening: to help you understand your strengths, find the right role, and grow throughout your career.

ODJ is organized around Roles and Openings. A Role is a durable career type, such as Data Engineer or AI Engineer: it describes the work, the skills that count, and where the path can lead. An Opening is a specific position hiring right now, with a level, a location, and an application. Roles help you see where you fit; from there, there is more than one way to move.

Today, you can apply to any Opening that fits you through our secure application system. You can also register for a Role to express interest in that broader category of work. A Role registration is not an application to every future Opening.

The work

QA and Test Engineers produce the evidence that tells a team whether software is ready to trust. They turn requirements, user stories, and risks into tests, run those tests by hand and through automation, and report what they find in terms a developer can act on and a decision-maker can rely on.

The work runs through the full stack, from the user interface through APIs, services, integrations, and databases to the environments they run in, and follows real user journeys end to end across all of them. It covers user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) testing, including usability testing with representative users; functional, regression, integration, end-to-end, and user acceptance testing; and performance and load testing. Accessibility testing checks conformance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and testers work with security specialists on the checks built into the delivery pipeline. QA and Test Engineers plan test strategies and schedules, build and maintain test environments and test data, write and maintain automated test suites, track defects to resolution, and define release criteria and report whether the evidence meets them.

Testing starts early and continues throughout delivery, whether testers sit inside the delivery team or provide an independent assessment. QA and Test Engineers work with product owners, business analysts, developers, and DevSecOps engineers so that quality is designed in, measured continuously, and documented well enough to stand up to an audit or an independent review.

What you'll build

• Test strategies, test plans, test cases, and scenarios traced to requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
• Automated test suites at the unit, API, and UI levels, wired into CI/CD pipelines, including end-to-end tests that follow a user journey through the front end, APIs, services, and databases.
• Usability, performance, load, compatibility, and accessibility results that show how a system behaves under the conditions tested, and where it falls short.
• Defect reports, root-cause evidence, and retest records that carry a problem through to a verified fix.
• Traceability matrices, test evidence, and release-readiness reports that support go-live decisions, authorization reviews, and audits.

Who you are

You are skeptical in a useful way. You read a requirement and see the case that would break it, and when something looks wrong, you keep exploring after the script ends. You care as much about the user who cannot use a mouse as about the one who can.

You report defects without drama, with reproducible steps and the evidence a developer needs to diagnose them. You would rather prevent a problem than report it, so you challenge unclear requirements early, and when the schedule pushes back, you make the unresolved release risks visible.

What you bring

• Experience designing and running tests for web applications or enterprise systems, with depth in at least one area: manual and exploratory testing, test automation, end-to-end testing across the UI, APIs, services, and databases, performance, or accessibility.
• Working knowledge of test design techniques such as boundary value analysis and exploratory testing, applied to negative and regression tests.
• Hands-on skill with the tools your specialty uses, such as Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, or Postman for automation, JMeter or k6 for performance, or screen readers and automated checkers for accessibility.
• The ability to trace a defect toward its source through reproducible steps, logs, data, and configuration, and to work with developers when the cause crosses system layers.
• Disciplined defect tracking and test documentation in a tool such as Jira, with close attention to accuracy in regulated or mission-critical work.

Register for QA and Test Engineer Role

Click Apply below to register for QA and Test Engineer Role.

What openings may require

Openings may emphasize manual and user acceptance testing, UI and UX testing, full-stack and end-to-end testing, test automation engineering (sometimes titled software development engineer in test, or SDET), API and integration testing, performance engineering, accessibility testing, or quality leadership across a program. Some may call for a particular framework, a scripting or programming language, SQL, cloud-hosted test environments, a testing certification such as one from the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), or experience with independent verification and validation. Accessibility-focused openings may require keyboard and screen-reader testing, manual conformance checks, and automated accessibility tools.

An AI-enabled opening may involve testing applications that call models, checking their outputs against expected behavior and safeguards, and using AI-assisted tools to generate and maintain tests, with every generated test reviewed before it is trusted.

Specific openings will state the expected testing depth, tools, work location, citizenship, work authorization, background, suitability, clearance, and domain knowledge.

Compensation, benefits, work location, and employment terms are set for each specific opening and will be stated with that opening.