Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA)

Knowledge Services is seeking a Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) for a long-term project in support of the State of Indiana.

• Applicants must be currently local to Indianapolis and able to work a hybrid work schedule and be onsite weekly working downtown Indianapolis
• Please note that we cannot accept any candidates requiring C2C or those requiring sponsorship for a work visa.

Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) Responsibilities:

Senior QA Analyst will own the end-to-end quality strategy from test architecture and automation framework design through defect management UAT coordination and release sign-off.

This is a technical leadership role requiring deep expertise across manual and automated testing CI/CD integration and the ability to communicate quality risk clearly to state agency stakeholders.

Test Strategy & Architecture

Design and own the master test strategy across functional regression integration performance security and UAT workstreams.

Define quality gates entry/exit criteria and go/no-go frameworks for sprint releases and major deployments.

Establish traceability from requirements through test execution to defect closure.

Test Automation

Design build and maintain automated UI regression suites (Selenium Playwright Cypress or equivalent).
Develop and maintain API test automation (Postman RestAssured or SoapUI) for backend services and system integrations.
Integrate automated suites into the CI/CD pipeline (Azure DevOps Jenkins or equivalent); automate regression gates at each build promotion.

Manual & Specialized Testing

Lead functional integration end-to-end and exploratory testing across concurrent workstreams.
Execute performance/load testing (JMeter LoadRunner or equivalent) to validate scalability under peak usage.
Perform SQL-based data integrity testing to verify backend accuracy transformation logic and data governance compliance.

Defect Management & Reporting

Own the full defect lifecycle: triage prioritization tracking root cause analysis and closure verification.
Deliver test execution reports defect density analyses and release readiness summaries to project leadership and stakeholders.
Maintain and report QA metrics: defect escape rate test coverage automation coverage ratio and mean time to detect/resolve.

UAT & Stakeholder Engagement

Plan and facilitate UAT with business users; manage session scheduling issue capture resolution tracking and formal sign-off.
Serve as primary QA liaison to program staff; communicate testing progress risk exposure and quality posture at all project levels.

Team & Quality Leadership

Mentor junior QA staff; establish automation code standards peer review practices and a shared QA knowledge base.
Champion shift-left testing and quality integration across planning development and deployment decision-making.

Senior Quality Assurance Analyst (QA) Required Skills & Experience:

57 years of QA experience; minimum 2 years in a senior or lead capacity on large-scale government IT projects.
Hands-on experience designing and implementing test automation frameworks (UI and/or API) in a production delivery environment.
Proven CI/CD pipeline integration experience (Azure DevOps Jenkins GitLab CI or equivalent).
Experience leading UAT coordination with non-technical government end users.
Proficiency in SQL for backend data validation and integrity testing.
Track record of audit-defensible test documentation (test strategies test plans RTMs defect logs test summary reports).
Bachelors degree in Computer Science Information Systems Software Engineering or related field.

Preferred Qualifications

Prior state government experience with DFR FSSA or comparable state human services IT contracts; familiarity with SNAP Medicaid TANF or CHIP eligibility systems.
Experience with performance/load testing tools (JMeter LoadRunner or Gatling).
Scripting proficiency in Python JavaScript Java or C# for automation development.

Certifications (Preferred)
ISTQB Advanced Level Test Analyst Test Manager or Test Automation Engineer
Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)
SAFe for Teams or equivalent Agile certification