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Lead Software Engineer in Test

Los Angeles, CA; Nashville, TN; New York City, NY; Portland, OR; Remote

Lead Software Engineer in Test

CD Baby — Platform Team

About Us

CD Baby is a globally recognized leader in the music industry and the first platform to offer artists direct distribution to their fans. Our technology organization has a deep history and a strong foundation, built by long-tenured, dedicated professionals. As we navigate the next era of music technology, we are committed to modernizing our core systems, fostering an agile culture, and leveraging cutting-edge platforms to better serve our artists, partners, and fans worldwide.

The Role

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer in Test to be the senior-most quality voice on CD Baby’s flagship customer-facing software: the members application our artists use to distribute their music, get paid, and understand their audiences, and the .com marketing site that brings new artists into the platform. This is a hands-on, individual-contributor role with broad technical authority over how we test — the engineer who treats quality as a software engineering discipline and builds the practice to prove it.

In the near term, you will help carry our customer-facing platform across the finish line for a brand relaunch worthy of CD Baby — standing up the automated coverage, the test data, and the CI/CD gates that let us ship with confidence. Beyond launch, your defining mandate is to architect our testing practice from the ground up: choose the frameworks, build the suites, integrate them into our delivery pipeline, and make automated, AI-augmented testing a first-class capability of the team as our customer-facing stack evolves from a .NET monolith into a modular, API-driven, service-based architecture.

This is a role for an engineer who is energized by both the discipline of writing the code that proves our software works every day, and the craft of designing a testing program that scales with the platform underneath it.

What You’ll Own

Testing Strategy & Practice

  • Define and drive the multi-year evolution of CD Baby’s automated testing practice — from a nascent Playwright-based program today to a comprehensive, AI-augmented testing capability that scales as our architecture moves from monolith to services.
  • Choose the right tools for each layer of the test pyramid: UI/end-to-end (currently Playwright), API and contract testing, integration testing across our third-party API seams (FUGA, Zendesk, Trolley, and others integral to our operations), and performance and load testing. Bring a clear point of view on what to use, why, and how it fits together.
  • Design and own the CI/CD test integration. Our pipeline runs on ArgoCD; you will define how tests gate every release, what runs where, how fast feedback loops are kept fast, and how the suite earns trust over time.
  • Establish test data strategy, environment management, and the engineering patterns that keep tests reliable as the surface area grows.

Building the Test Suite

  • Own the test suite for the entire flagship application. The primary job here is writing the code — the tests, the fixtures, the helpers, the harnesses — that proves the member application and the .com marketing site work as our customers expect, release after release.
  • Cover the .NET monolith we operate today, the Next.js front end, and the new services as they emerge. Build coverage that travels with the architecture rather than fighting it.
  • Treat usability and stability as first-class quality concerns alongside functional correctness. Our interfaces must be intuitive, accessible, and dependable; your tests should help us prove all three.
  • Use AI aggressively as a force multiplier. Drive AI-assisted test authoring, suite generation, and maintenance so that one senior engineer can credibly cover the full surface area of a complex product. We expect the toolchain you build to look meaningfully different from a traditional QA program because of how you apply AI.

Cross-Functional Team Craft

  • Embed on a cross-functional Platform team alongside front end engineers, back end engineers, a data engineer, a designer, and a product manager. We share ownership over outcomes for our users — quality is the team’s job, and your job is to make sure the team is equipped to do it well.
  • Participate in agile ceremonies as the customer and quality voice in the room. Bring a QA lens to story refinement: what could break, what the edge cases are, what “done” really means. Then implement the automated tests that ship with each story.
  • Be the catcher on the field — the engineer who sees the whole game, anticipates what’s coming, and quietly guides the team toward better outcomes. Mentor by example: through the quality of your tests, the clarity of your reviews, and your willingness to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with another engineer when something is hard.

What You’ll Bring

  • 10+ years of software engineering experience with a deep specialization in test automation, or equivalent experience as a Senior/Staff/Lead SDET, SET, or Quality Engineer at companies that treat testing as an engineering discipline.
  • Demonstrated track record of architecting a testing practice from early stage to mature — selecting frameworks, building suites, integrating them into CI/CD, and earning the trust of the engineering organization over time.
  • Phenomenal hands-on coding ability. You write production-quality code, and your tests look like production code: well-factored, well-named, easy to maintain, and built to last.
  • Strong experience with Playwright (or comparable modern end-to-end frameworks such as Cypress or Selenium) and a clear point of view on when and how to use them.
  • Deep experience with API testing and contract testing, including testing the seams between your application and critical third-party APIs. You know how to mock, stub, and record/replay responsibly, and when each is appropriate.
  • Experience designing and running performance and load testing programs, with the judgment to choose the right tooling for the workload (k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust, etc.).
  • Hands-on experience applying AI to testing workflows — AI-assisted test authoring, suite generation, self-healing tests, AI-driven coverage analysis, or comparable approaches. You are fluent with modern AI coding tools and treat them as core to your craft.
  • Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. Familiarity with ArgoCD, Kubernetes, and containerized test environments is a plus; the ability to learn our specific stack quickly is required.
  • Working knowledge of the .NET and Next.js ecosystems sufficient to read and reason about the code you are testing. You don’t need to be a .NET expert; you do need to be comfortable in the codebase.
  • A clear point of view on accessibility (WCAG) and usability testing, and the experience to back it up.
  • Excellent communication. You can explain a coverage gap, a flaky test, or a release risk to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision.

Skills & Competencies

  • Quality as Engineering: You treat testing as a software engineering discipline. Everything is code, everything is reviewable, everything belongs in the pipeline.
  • AI Fluency: You use AI as a force multiplier across your work and have strong opinions about where it adds real leverage and where it doesn’t.
  • Architectural Thinking: You design test architectures that match the systems they cover — simple where the system is simple, layered where it is layered, evolvable where it must evolve.
  • Pragmatic Bar-Raising: You raise the quality bar without becoming a bottleneck. You know when to write the test, when to teach the engineer to write it, and when to let it ship.
  • Mentorship by Example: You raise the people around you through the quality of your work, the clarity of your reviews, and your willingness to dig into a hard bug alongside the engineer who wrote the code.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: You partner naturally with engineering, product, design, data, and DevSecOps, and you treat those partnerships as core to the work rather than adjacent to it.
  • Customer-Centric Mindset: Relentless focus on the artist experience. You think about usability, accessibility, and stability the way the customer would — because in the end, that’s what your tests are protecting.
  • Clear Communication: You can articulate risk, coverage, and trade-offs to engineers, product partners, and executives with equal precision — in writing, in reviews, and in person.

Location

Remote within the United States. This role works on Pacific Time hours to maintain strong overlap with the Platform team.

Reporting Structure

This role reports to the Director of Engineering.

Compensation

CD Baby provides base salary ranges for all positions located in the United States at the time of posting. The hiring range for this position is $160,000 – $180,000 annually. As a candidate for this position, your salary and related elements of compensation will be contingent upon various factors including, but not limited to, work experience, geographic location, and relevant skills. Downtown is committed to providing a comprehensive market-competitive total rewards program for its employees which includes medical, dental, and vision, life insurance, 401(k) match, and generous paid time off. This range does not include any other variable compensation components.

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