Staff Software Development Engineer in Test

Lead development of  the quality systems that help Workiva’s Growth Engineering teams ship customer-facing innovation with speed and confidence. As a Staff Software Development Engineer in Test, you will be a hands-on technical leader responsible for the testing activities, quality platform, engineering standards, and developer workflows that support multiple product teams across Growth Engineering. You’ll solve complex problems in test infrastructure, distributed-systems validation, CI/CD reliability, performance, and observability, not simply automate test cases. You will partner with Principal Engineers, Product Directors, other Quality teams and Engineering leaders to make quality an integrated capability of the software delivery lifecycle rather than a late-stage checkpoint. This is a Staff-level individual contributor role with broad organizational influence: you will set technical direction, build high-leverage solutions, and enable teams to adopt scalable quality practices. What You’ll Do Define and execute the technical vision for quality engineering across Growth Engineering, including reusable test tooling, infrastructure, standards, and paved-road developer experiences Architect, build, and evolve scalable automated test frameworks that support API, integration, contract, end-to-end, user-workflow, performance, and resiliency testing Design and implement quality-platform capabilities for complex distributed systems, including CI/CD integrations, test-environment strategies, release validation, and actionable quality signals Drive comprehensive performance, load, scale, reliability, and chaos-testing approaches for critical services and customer workflows Establish meaningful quality metrics, telemetry standards, and dashboards that help engineering teams identify release risk, system vulnerabilities, and customer-impacting regressions early Partner with product and engineering teams to embed quality practices throughout planning, development, delivery, and production operations Lead multi-quarter, cross-functional technical initiatives from problem definition through architecture, implementation, adoption, and measurable outcomes Work closely with Principal Engineers, Product Directors, and Engineering Leadership to align quality investments with product strategy, architectural roadmaps, and customer needs Prototype and personally deliver high-leverage platform components while enabling product teams to adopt and extend shared capabilities Lead and mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers, raise the technical bar for quality engineering, and create repeatable practices that scale beyond a single team Champion a customer-centered quality mindset by connecting production signals, user workflows, and engineering decisions to the customer experience Drive alignment across product lines and stakeholders to resolve ambiguous technical problems and establish durable engineering standards What You’ll Need Minimum Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience 4+ years of experience in software engineering, software development in test, test infrastructure, quality engineering, or a related technical discipline Preferred Qualifications Experience leading complex, ambiguous, multi-team technical initiatives from technical strategy through delivery, adoption, and measurable outcomes Managed outsourced testing teams Deep experience designing and building scalable automated testing strategies, frameworks, and tooling for distributed systems, microservices, APIs, and backend infrastructure Strong software engineering fundamentals and proficiency in one or more modern languages, such as TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, or JavaScript Experience building quality capabilities across the software delivery lifecycle, including CI/CD integration, test environments, release validation, observability, and multiple testing layers such as unit, integration,