Principal QA Engineer

The Opportunity

We are seeking a hands-on Principal QA Engineer to drive the evolution of quality engineering across our platform. In this role, you will define and scale our automation strategy, partnering with Product, Engineering, and Dev Ops to build fast, reliable, and CI/CD-native testing solutions with a strong focus on Playwright and API-first automation.

Department: Quality Assurance

Location: Melville, NY

Compensation: $160,000 / year

We are seeking a hands-on Principal QA Engineer to drive the evolution of quality engineering across our platform. In this role, you will define and scale our automation strategy, partnering with Product, Engineering, and Dev Ops to build fast, reliable, and CI/CD-native testing solutions with a strong focus on Playwright and API-first automation.

You will act as a technical leader across multiple teams, creating reusable frameworks and shared tooling, modernizing legacy approaches, and mentoring engineers to increase automation adoption and release confidence. You will use metrics, observability, and AI-accelerated solutions to identify inefficiencies, reduce regression time, and enable faster, higher-quality delivery.

The ideal candidate is a strong coder and automation architect who thrives on solving systemic quality challenges and elevating how teams build, test, and ship software. Success in this role is measured by improved automation efficiency, faster pipeline feedback, and the ability for teams to independently deliver high-quality releases.

This role operates as a horizontal quality leader across multiple product and platform teams, driving test automation strategy, improving execution efficiency, and enabling scalable, modern quality engineering practices using Playwright, API automation, AI-accelerated workflows and more.

We are a small team with a big vision: to be the premier provider of cloud technology solutions for retailers. KWI offers a complete, unified commerce solution from a single database, specifically designed to help specialty retailers grow their business. Our portfolio of customers includes Pandora, Bluemercury, Tom Ford and many other globally recognizable brands.

We combine Point of Sale, Merchandising, Order Management, eCommerce, CRM, and Loss Prevention into one cloud-based platform. We are a values‑and‑mission-driven organization, and we believe that if we develop and demonstrate leadership in our strategy, operations, and people, we will continue to drive product innovation and service excellence.

• Lead the automation and quality engineering vision across teams, establishing scalable standards and modern frameworks (Playwright, API‑first testing).
• Act as a hands‑on technical coach and enabler, improving automation adoption, stability, and execution speed.
• Transform legacy and slow regression models into fast, CI/CD-native, data‑driven pipelines.
• Use metrics, observability, and risk‑based strategies to drive release confidence.
• Introduce AI‑accelerated testing approaches to increase engineering productivity.
• Own quality outcomes end‑to‑end, from architecture and testability to production validation.

• Mentor a team of Automation Engineers, collaborating closely with Products and developers to automate test cases and scenarios effectively.
• Apply coding and programming languages effectively to testing activities, demonstrating a strong understanding of their application.
• Monitor industry‑standard metrics and account‑specific metrics to adapt internal QA standards accordingly.
• Ensure the delivery of high‑quality releases with minimal defects.
• Collaborate with the Technical Lead and developers to define and comprehend test requirements.
• Provide accurate estimates, including risk assessment, for effective planning and commitments.
• Manage and assess the testing workload while effectively communicating resource requirements to meet targets.

• Proficient in an object‑oriented language, preferably Java or C#.
• Strong hands‑on experience in Web and Mobile Automation using tools such as Selenium, Appium, Maven, and TestNG.
• Architect and lead…