A- Work from
- United States
- Contract
- Full-time
- Experience
- Lead
- Salary
- $179K – $234K / year
- Posted
- 12 November 2026
- Apply by
- 11 January 2027
As a Player-Coach Test Engineering Lead, you will lead a geographically distributed test engineering team while remaining a hands-on architect, coder and troubleshooter. You will own the engineering of a CI/CD-native quality system for cloud-based voice, media and contact-center platforms: functional automation, protocol- and traffic-level validation, synthetic monitoring, performance and chaos engineering. You will also transform conventional QA into an AI-enabled, continuously validating engineering capability.
About the role
This is a player-coach role in a fast-paced, startup-like environment—not a coordination-only test management position.
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor and grow a remote/distributed automation team; establish standards, technical direction, code review, delivery accountability and a visible engineering backlog while contributing production-quality code.
- Architect and implement Playwright-based UI/API automation, contract and integration tests, service-level tests, and end-to-end customer journeys. Select complementary tools for protocols and real-time media where browser automation is insufficient.
- Embed tests into GitHub Actions/Jenkins/Argo CD and GitOps delivery gates: pull-request checks, ephemeral environments, deployment verification, risk-based suites, release qualifications and fast failure feedback.
- Build reliable voice/media/contact-center test harnesses covering SIP signaling, RTP/SRTP media, WebRTC, IVR, agent interactions, call routing, conferencing, transfers, hold/resume, recording and messaging where applicable.
- Engineer continuous traffic generation and synthetic journeys across calling, messaging and API workflows; correlate functional outcomes with signaling traces, media quality, logs, infrastructure and service telemetry.
- Own performance engineering: workload modeling, load/stress/soak testing, concurrency, throughput, queue depth, latency, resource saturation, capacity limits and customer-experience thresholds.
- Introduce chaos/fault-injection scenarios (node failures, network impairment, dependency loss, rate limiting, failover, degraded media) with explicit blast-radius and rollback safeguards.
- Build agentic workflows for test generation, execution orchestration, flaky-test diagnosis, selective retesting, impact analysis, root-cause hints and self-healing pipelines; require auditable, reviewed repairs rather than silent assertion weakening.
- Drive observability-led troubleshooting using Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Thanos, Alloy, OpenTelemetry, traces, packet captures and traffic analysis; debug failure across browser, API, network, Kubernetes, services and databases.
- Partner with platform, SRE, CloudOps, application engineering, security and release teams on security, zero trust, FedRAMP/PCI DSS/SOC 2 evidence, test-data protection and release readiness.
Requirements
Required Experience
- 10+ years in software/test engineering or quality engineering, including meaningful technical leadership of remote or globally distributed engineers; demonstrable current hands-on coding.
- Strong Python, TypeScript/JavaScript or equivalent programming; Playwright and API/integration automation, testing architecture, maintainable frameworks and CI/CD integration.
- Hands-on load and performance tooling (e.g., k6, Gatling, JMeter or Locust), measurement interpretation and systems-level bottleneck investigation.
- Production or lab experience testing real-time voice/media or contact-center systems; ability to inspect SIP/RTP/WebRTC/HTTP traffic and reason about customer-visible outcomes.
- Cloud-native proficiency with Kubernetes, Linux, networking, TLS, DNS, ingress/API gateways, distributed systems and observability stacks.
- Experience applying AI coding tools or agentic workflows to real test engineering work, with validation and security controls.
- Ability to make pragmatic technical decisions and deliver iteratively under changing priorities without sacrificing reliability.
Education
Bachelor degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science or Engineering
Nice to have
- Azure/GCP/AWS, Terraform, Helm, Argo CD/GitOps; Kafka, Redis, relational/document databases and event-driven architectures.
- Telephony and contact-center technology (SBCs, codecs, jitter, packet loss, MOS, call flows, dial plans, IVR and agent desktop).
- Experience with policy-gated autonomous remediation, MCP/tool orchestration, AI agent evaluation and protected test-data handling.
- Engineering in regulated environments with traceability and evidence supporting FedRAMP, PCI DSS or SOC 2.
Eligibility
- Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future.
About Avaya
Avaya is an enterprise software leader that helps the world’s largest organizations and government agencies forge unbreakable connections.
The Avaya Infinity™ platform unifies fragmented customer experiences, connecting the channels, insights, technologies, and workflows that together create enduring customer and employee relationships.
We believe success is built through strong connections – with each other, with our work, and with our mission. At Avaya, you'll find a community that values your contributions and supports your growth every step of the way.
Learn more at
Sponsorship and Equal Opportunity
Avaya is an Equal Opportunity employer and a U.S. Federal Contractor. Our commitment to equality is a core value of Avaya. All qualified applicants and employees receive equal treatment without consideration for race, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran or any other protected characteristic. In general, positions at Avaya require the ability to communicate and use office technology effectively. Physical requirements may vary by assigned work location.
This job brief/description is subject to change. Nothing in this job description restricts Avaya right to alter the duties and responsibilities of this position at any time for any reason.
Pay Transparency
The pay range for this opportunity is from $179,127 to $234,100 + benefits. This range represents the anticipated low and high end of the salary plus bonus for this position. Actual total compensation will vary and is based on factors such as a candidate’s qualifications, skills, and competencies.
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