Software QA Engineer

Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Somewear's software platform and satellite-powered hardware enable commercial and government teams to maintain situational awareness during high-pressure operations — in any environment. Somewear serves a wide range of customers including helicopter paramedics, backcountry explorers, firefighters, and operators within the US Department of Defense. Our purpose is to build best-in-class solutions that keep people in touch, informed, and safe anywhere in the world.

We're looking for a Senior SDET to build and drive test engineering across Somewear's platform. Working from our San Francisco or Chicago offices, you will design and own the automated testing infrastructure that ensures our solutions meet the rigorous demands of mission‑critical operations.

Recently, the United States Air National Guard 131st Rescue Squadron successfully employed Somewear's unique ATAK integration to coordinate and monitor a civilian rescue operation 1,200 miles off the U.S. Pacific coast. The consistent communications and situational awareness across rescue personnel, medical personnel, aircrafts, and the operations center led to an efficient rescue mission that took half of the expected time to complete.

• Design, build, and maintain scalable test automation frameworks across our mobile, web, and hardware platform ecosystem.
• Write production-quality test code — unit, integration, end-to-end, and hardware-in-the-loop — with the same rigor applied to the product itself.
• Embed quality into the development lifecycle by partnering directly with engineering teams to shift testing left.
• Own CI/CD test integration, ensuring fast, reliable feedback loops across all pipelines.
• Build and maintain hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and simulator environments to validate firmware and hardware behavior without requiring physical devices at every test stage.
• Develop protocol-level test coverage for communication layers (BLE, LoRa, LTE, satellite protocols) where failure has real-world consequences.
• Lead root cause analysis for complex, cross-platform failures and drive systemic fixes.
• Make data-driven decisions about test coverage gaps, flakiness, and quality risk.
• Build tooling and instrumentation to surface quality signals to engineering and leadership through observability integrations.
• Champion testability in architecture and design reviews, including firmware and hardware interfaces.
• Foster a quality-first engineering culture without sacrificing shipping velocity.

• 5+ years of SDET or software engineering experience with a strong testing focus.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language — Python, Kotlin, Swift, JavaScript, or similar; ability to read C/C++ for firmware boundary testing is a plus.
• Proven experience building and scaling test automation frameworks from the ground up in multi-platform environments.
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines and how to integrate testing effectively at each stage (Jenkins, Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI, or equivalent).
• Experience with platform-native mobile test frameworks — XCTest (iOS) and/or Espresso/UI Automator (Android) — in addition to cross-platform tools like Appium.
• Experience with API and service-level testing, including contract testing approaches (Pact or similar) to validate cross-service boundaries.
• Proficiency in containerized test environments using Docker and/or Kubernetes.
• Ability to debug and diagnose complex, cross-platform issues spanning software, hardware, and communication protocol boundaries.

• Experience building or operating hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing infrastructure.
• Protocol-level testing experience with BLE, LoRa, LTE, MQTT, or satellite communication stacks.
• Familiarity with performance and load testing tools (JMeter, Locust, Gatling) and security testing tools (OWASP ZAP, Burp Suite).
• Experience with test observability and telemetry integration (Datadog, Prometheus, or similar).
• Background in defense, public safety, or emergency response software.
• Familiarity with requirements-based verification, requirements traceability, and risk-based testing…