Quality Advocate (AI-First Engineering)

THE ROLE

This is a contributor role working on a small, cross-functional team made up of 2–3 developers, a product manager, and 1 Quality Advocate. The Quality Advocate is not solely responsible for quality in a team but should be always engaged in activities that will promote quality software development. That means your days may include helping define features from a user’s perspective, writing test cases anyone on the team can execute, or helping write automated tests with developers. This position reports to Software Development leadership.

At Ncontracts, we embrace an AI-first engineering culture. Our QA team actively uses agentic development tools, modern automation frameworks, and AI-powered workflows to accelerate quality at every stage of the development lifecycle. We expect our Quality Advocates to be curious, adaptive practitioners who lean into these tools — not just to do their jobs faster, but to help redefine what great quality engineering looks like.

What You’ll Do

• Help your team produce high quality software, suggesting appropriate tools and process changes when necessary

• Ensure that time is spent primarily on shift-left tasks like test case writing and user story definition

• Write and maintain Playwright automation tests to be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, contributing to a fully automated regression and validation strategy

• Use agentic tools such as Devin to accelerate test authoring and explore AI-assisted approaches to quality engineering

• Leverage MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations to connect to test suites in Xray (Jira), streamlining test management and traceability

• Help with bug diagnosis and analysis

• Work as a collaborative teammate, ensuring everyone understands what high-quality means for current work

• Stay up to date on processes and tooling for improving quality, especially in the rapidly evolving AI tooling landscape

• Participate in learning and growth opportunities

• Be available to assist with release activities, and develop automated smoke test suites to accelerate that work

How You’ll Show Up

• Honesty: Whether reviewing another developer’s code, participating in retrospectives, or working with your team on project direction, we expect openness and honesty. Honesty creates trust, and we believe all great teams are built on trust.

• Low Ego: Have confidence in your skills and experience but be willing to alter your opinions when a better one comes along. Strong opinions, loosely held.

• Instinctive Troubleshooting: Rapid diagnosis and resolution of bugs or problems is essential to a productive team. We expect our Quality Advocates to bring significant experiential knowledge to bear quickly.

• Deep Curiosity: You’ll be expected to research new technologies, perfect the use of existing ones, and discover tools — including AI-powered tools — that can drive change across the organization.

• Automation Mindset: You view manual testing as a starting point, not a destination. You’re always thinking about how to encode knowledge into repeatable, automated tests that add lasting value to the team.

• Motivation: You’re a natural self-starter who enjoys solving problems. You can jump in with minimal instruction and figure out what should be done.

Required Skills & Experience

• Experience with diverse testing methodologies and tools

• Experience writing test cases and helping to craft acceptance criteria

• Experience working on a cross-functional team delivering software

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

• A genuine interest in AI-first tooling and a willingness to incorporate agentic workflows into day-to-day quality work

Nice to Have

• Hands-on experience with Playwright for end-to-end test automation, or strong working knowledge of similar tools (Selenium, Cypress) with a clear appetite to learn Playwright

• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps)

• Familiarity with AI-powered development tools such as Devin, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding assistants

• Experience with test management in Xray for Jira, or similar tools; exposure to MCP-based integrations is a plus

• ISTQB certifications

• Experience working with horizontally scaling systems

• Functional knowledge of SQL as a tool for analysis and debugging

• Familiarity with systems integration

• Experience in SaaS-based companies