Talon Hiring Solutions has a client in the greater Birmingham, AL area that is seeking a hands-on Quality Assurance Engineer to serve as the independent quality gate for customer-facing applications. This role will validate stories, features, and bug fixes against acceptance criteria and the organization's Definition of Done, combining automated testing with risk-based manual and exploratory testing.
What You'll Do
- Serve as the independent quality gate for customer-facing applications, accepting or rejecting work items based on defined quality standards.
- Collaborate with Product Owners, developers, and stakeholders to refine requirements and ensure work items meet the Definition of Ready before development begins.
- Validate features, enhancements, and bug fixes against business requirements, acceptance criteria, and the Definition of Done.
- Develop test plans and execute functional, regression, negative, boundary, end-to-end, exploratory, and risk-based testing.
- Own and manage the QA environment, including promoting builds from Development to QA for validation.
- Review automated test coverage and results to identify gaps, regressions, and quality risks.
- Leverage approved AI/agentic workflows to support test planning, requirements analysis, exploratory testing, investigation, and documentation.
- Perform hands-on manual testing of critical workflows across web, mobile, and Windows applications.
- Investigate legacy applications and unfamiliar functionality, even when documentation or automated coverage is limited.
- Document defects with clear reproduction steps, supporting evidence, and actionable details for development teams.
- Utilize automated UI and API testing to validate application functionality and reduce regression risk.
- Participate in Agile meetings, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
- Collaborate with development teams throughout the SDLC while maintaining an independent perspective on quality.
- Raise quality concerns when requirements are not satisfied and confidently block acceptance when necessary.
What You'll Bring
- 3+ years of hands-on software QA experience or equivalent demonstrated capability.
- Experience working in an Agile, sprint-based SDLC environment.
- Demonstrated experience independently testing customer-facing web, mobile, and Windows applications.
- Strong knowledge of functional, exploratory, regression, negative, boundary, and risk-based testing.
- Ability to translate requirements and acceptance criteria into effective test cases and testing strategies.
- Experience making and defending evidence-based accept/reject decisions.
- Experience using AI coding agents or strong aptitude for incorporating AI-assisted/agentic workflows into QA practices.
- Ability to investigate unfamiliar, complex, or poorly documented legacy applications.
- Strong defect documentation skills with clear, reproducible, and actionable reporting.
- Working knowledge of SPA web applications, REST APIs, relational databases, and modern identity management.
- Familiarity with automated UI testing frameworks such as Playwright.
- Experience with API testing tools such as Bruno or Postman.
- Experience using browser developer tools for network, console, and client-side troubleshooting.
- Experience testing mobile applications.
- Working knowledge of Azure DevOps, Git, and CI/CD test results.
- Strong written communication, critical thinking, organization, and time-management skills.
- Confidence to challenge assumptions, raise quality concerns, and block acceptance when quality or requirements are not met.