Senior Quality Assurance Analyst; QA)

Overview

Knowledge Services is seeking a Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) for a long-term project in support of the State of Indiana.

• Applicants must be currently local to Indianapolis and able to work a hybrid work schedule and be onsite weekly working downtown Indianapolis
• Please note that we cannot accept any candidates requiring C2C or those requiring sponsorship for a work visa.

Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) Responsibilities:

• Senior QA Analyst will own the end-to-end quality strategy — from test architecture and automation framework design through defect management, UAT coordination, and release sign-off.
• This is a technical leadership role requiring deep expertise across manual and automated testing, CI/CD integration, and the ability to communicate quality risk clearly to state agency stakeholders.

Test Strategy & Architecture

• Design and own the master test strategy across functional, regression, integration, performance, security, and UAT work streams.
• Define quality gates, entry/exit criteria, and go/no-go frameworks for sprint releases and major deployments.
• Establish traceability from requirements through test execution to defect closure.

Test Automation

• Design, build, and maintain automated UI regression suites (Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, or equivalent).
• Develop and maintain API test automation (Postman, Rest Assured, or SoapUI) for backend services and system integrations.
• Integrate automated suites into the CI/CD pipeline (Azure Dev Ops, Jenkins, or equivalent); automate regression gates at each build promotion.

Manual & Specialized Testing

• Lead functional, integration, end-to-end, and exploratory testing across concurrent work streams.
• Execute performance/load testing (JMeter, Load Runner, or equivalent) to validate scalability under peak usage.
• Perform SQL-based data integrity testing to verify backend accuracy, transformation logic, and data governance compliance.

Defect Management & Reporting

• Own the full defect lifecycle: triage, prioritization, tracking, root cause analysis, and closure verification.
• Deliver test execution reports, defect density analyses, and release readiness summaries to project leadership and stakeholders.
• Maintain and report QA metrics: defect escape rate, test coverage, automation coverage ratio, and mean time to detect/resolve.

UAT & Stakeholder Engagement

• Plan and facilitate UAT with business users; manage session scheduling, issue capture, resolution tracking, and formal sign-off.
• Serve as primary QA liaison to program staff; communicate testing progress, risk exposure, and quality posture at all project levels.

Team & Quality Leadership

• Mentor junior QA staff; establish automation code standards, peer review practices, and a shared QA knowledge base.
• Champion shift-left testing and quality integration across planning, development, and deployment decision-making.

Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) Required

Skills & Experience:

• 5–7 years of QA experience; minimum 2 years in a senior or lead capacity on large‑scale government IT projects.
• Hands‑on experience designing and implementing test automation frameworks (UI and/or API) in a production delivery environment.
• Proven CI/CD pipeline integration experience (Azure Dev Ops, Jenkins, Git Lab CI, or equivalent).
• Experience leading UAT coordination with non‑technical government end users.
• Proficiency in SQL for backend data validation and integrity testing.
• Track record of audit‑defensible test documentation (test strategies, test plans, RTMs, defect logs, test summary reports).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior state government experience with DFR, FSSA, or comparable state human…