Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

Senior QA Engineer

Location: Cleveland, OH (Onsite)

Structure: 6-month Contract-to-Hire

About the Client

Our client is a global leader in the development, manufacture, distribution, and sale of paints, coatings, and related products. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, the company serves professional, industrial, commercial, and retail customers around the world, delivering trusted products and innovative solutions that help customers protect and beautify what matters most.

About the Role

The Senior QA Engineer sits on our client’s Systems Testing team and is focused on non-functional testing across the applications and services supporting their retail store operations. This individual is responsible for validating that systems perform reliably under load and remain secure, working across multiple applications rather than within a single product team.

The role centers on three areas: performance testing, security and penetration testing, and hands-on manual validation. Day to day, that means designing and executing load and stress tests, analyzing results to identify bottlenecks, assessing applications and APIs for security vulnerabilities, and partnering with development, infrastructure, and security teams to drive remediation. The Senior QA Engineer works directly with the project, program, and product teams rather than through a QA lead layer, and communicates performance and security risk clearly to both technical and business audiences. This is a fully onsite role in downtown Cleveland.

Job Description – Duties & Responsibilities

• Designs, executes, and analyzes performance tests against web applications, services, and APIs, including load, stress, endurance, and scalability testing.
• Builds and maintains performance test scripts and workload models that reflect realistic production usage patterns.
• Analyzes performance test results to identify bottlenecks across the application, services, and database tiers, and partners with development and infrastructure teams on remediation.
• Establishes and monitors performance baselines, thresholds, and benchmarks, and reports results and trends to technical and business stakeholders.
• Plans and executes security and penetration testing against applications and APIs, identifying vulnerabilities and validating remediation.
• Assesses applications against common security risks and industry standards, and documents findings with clear severity, impact, and reproduction detail.
• Partners with development, infrastructure, and security teams to prioritize and verify the resolution of identified vulnerabilities.
• Performs hands-on manual testing in support of non-functional validation, including exploratory testing and verification of fixes.
• Writes and executes SQL queries to validate data integrity and support database-level testing and performance analysis.
• Authors, organizes, and maintains test cases and execution cycles in Zephyr or a comparable test case management tool, and documents strategy, coverage, and results in Confluence and SharePoint.
• Integrates automated and non-functional test execution into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub and GitHub Actions.
• Contributes to BDD-based test coverage using Cucumber, TestNG, and Maven where applicable.
• Participates in Agile ceremonies including refinement, planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives, and manages work through Jira.
• Provides early input on non-functional requirements, including performance targets and security considerations, before development begins.
• Identifies gaps in existing non-functional test coverage and recommends improvements to testing standards, tooling, and process.

Experience, Skills and Abilities Needed

Required:

• 7+ years of experience in quality assurance engineering or software testing.
• Hands-on experience designing and executing performance testing against applications, services, and APIs, including load, stress, and endurance testing.
• Hands-on experience with security and/or penetration testing of applications and APIs.
• Strong manual testing background, including test case design, execution, and defect management.
• Ability to analyze test results and identify performance bottlenecks across application, service, and database tiers.
• Experience with Jira and working in Agile environments.
• Experience with Zephyr or a comparable test case management tool.
• Experience with GitHub and GitHub Actions.
• Working knowledge of SQL and database testing.
• Experience documenting test strategy and results in Confluence, SharePoint, or similar tools.
• Exposure to BDD practices and frameworks such as Cucumber, TestNG, and Maven.
• Strong understanding of software testing standards, policies, methodologies, tools, and processes.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to present findings to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams.
• Ability to work onsite in Cleveland, Ohio five days per week.

Preferred:

• Security certifications such as OSCP, CEH, GPEN, or GWAPT.
• Experience with performance testing tools such as Apache JMeter, Gatling, LoadRunner, or k6.
• Experience with security testing tools such as Burp Suite, OWASP ZAP, Nessus, or comparable platforms.
• Familiarity with the OWASP Top 10 and common application security risk frameworks.
• Experience with API testing tools such as Postman, Swagger, or Rest Assured.
• Experience with application performance monitoring and observability tooling.
• Retail or point-of-sale domain experience.
• Experience in a large enterprise environment with multiple integrated systems and shared test environments.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Other:

• Strong quality mindset with a focus on system reliability, resilience, and security.
• Ability to work independently and own non-functional test outcomes across multiple applications.
• Structured thinker with the ability to bring clarity to complex, cross-system problems.
• Comfortable communicating risk clearly and constructively to engineering and leadership audiences.
• Proactive, self-starter with a bias for action and continuous improvement.

About Us:

At Brooksource, relationships are the foundation of everything we do. Since 2000, we’ve built lasting partnerships with clients, consultants, and internal teams to deliver an exceptional experience across every engagement. As a trusted IT and Engineering services provider, Brooksource supports Fortune 500 organizations through Experience-Driven Staffing, Professional Services, and Elevate, our proprietary Workforce Transformation program. Whether you’re hiring for software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data analytics, or enterprise IT, our customized staffing solutions are designed to align with your company’s unique goals, culture, and technology stack. We offer flexible hiring models, including contract, contract-to-hire, and direct placement to meet your evolving business needs.

We are a certified partner of leading platforms, including Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, enabling us to deliver scalable, end-to-end technology solutions. With a growing national footprint, Brooksource is redefining expectations in IT consulting, engineering services, and technology workforce solutions.

EEO Statement:

Brooksource is an equal opportunity employer that does not discriminate on the basis of actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), gender identity or gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, military service and veteran status, physical or mental disability, protected medical condition as defined by applicable state or local law, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws and ordinances.

Benefits & Perks:

Brooksource offers competitive medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Dependent Care FSA, and supplemental coverage with plans that can fit each employee’s needs. We offer a 401k plan that includes a company match and is fully vested after you become eligible, paid time off, sick time, and paid company holidays. We also offer an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) that provides services like virtual counseling, financial services, legal services, life coaching, etc.

Pay Disclaimer:

The pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.