Senior Test & Quality Assurance Engineer, Cyber Missions

This is an active, impact-ready, fully-funded position.

Location:

Columbia, MD

Telework: TBD, subject to manager approval and tasking

Clearance Required:

TS/SCI with Polygraph

Salary Range: $175,000 to $195,000

At Shadow Strategies, you will join a culture defined by innovation, purpose, and meaningful impact. We seek test engineers who bring structure to complexity, connect technical decisions across the system, and turn mission needs into reliable operational capability. If you are inspired by complexity, motivated by clarity, and committed to excellence, we invite you to become part of something exceptional.

This role provides quality assurance and testing engineering leadership for the development and evolution of a declarative, mission-adaptable workflow capability supporting cyber operations. You will define and execute the program's test and quality strategy, ensuring software, infrastructure, automation, and mission services meet performance, reliability, security, and operational requirements. You will work directly with mission stakeholders, developers, systems engineers, and operators to establish verification and validation approaches, develop automated testing capabilities, and ensure mission-critical functionality is delivered with confidence.

• Lead test engineering and quality assurance activities across the full system lifecycle
• Develop and maintain requirements-based test strategies, test plans, procedures, and quality metrics
• Define and implement automated test frameworks and CI/CD test integration
• Design, execute, and oversee functional, integration, system, regression, and operational testing
• Analyze test results and provide quality assessments to program leadership
• Identify, document, prioritize, and track defects through resolution
• Lead testing during integration events, operational demonstrations, and customer acceptance activities
• Collaborate with systems engineers, software developers, and operators to improve product quality and mission effectiveness
• Mentor junior test engineers and foster continuous improvement of quality processes
• Serve as a trusted advisor to program leadership on quality assurance and test engineering matters

• You have led testing and quality assurance efforts for complex mission systems
• You can develop comprehensive test strategies and adapt them to evolving mission requirements
• You have experience identifying quality risks and implementing mitigation strategies before they impact mission delivery
• You enjoy improving engineering processes and raising the overall quality of deliver capabilities
• You are passionate about building confidence in systems through rigorous verification and validation

• Leadership of test engineering and quality assurance activities for complex software-intensive systems
• Test planning, test case development, and test execution
• Verification and validation methodology
• Requirements-based testing and traceability
• Defect management and root-cause analysis
• Automated testing frameworks and test automation development
• Integration, system and operational testing
• Technical troubleshooting and quality risk assessment
• Technical documentation and quality reporting
• Experience supporting Agile environments

• CYBERCOM or related cyber mission environments
• Offensive cyber operations, mission automation, or declarative workflow systems
• Dev Sec Ops  and CI/CD pipeline testing
• Cloud, containerized, or Kubernetes-based environments
• REST APIs, service integrations, and automated provisioning

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field and 12 years of experience

OR an associate degree and 16 years of experience

OR 18 years of experience without…