Senior Quality Engineer

About the role

Join KAYAK as a Senior Quality Engineer to enhance the KAYAK4Business product. This role involves shaping the quality strategy, improving automation, and driving specialized quality practices for millions of global travelers. You will collaborate with engineering, product, and design teams to establish high standards for product quality.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Define and track quality metrics such as defect escape rate, automated coverage, and release risk scores for critical business areas.
• Develop and implement a built-in quality strategy for your domain, including shift-left testing, contract testing, or synthetic monitoring.
• Manage the ticketing pipeline, triage new customer issues, identify trends, and escalate critical problems to engineering.
• Evaluate, pilot, and promote AI-assisted quality tools for tasks like test case generation, defect triage, and log analysis.
• Audit and expand automated test coverage across unit, integration, API, and end-to-end levels, prioritizing investments based on risk.
• Refine and automate production testing practices, such as canary releases and synthetic transactions, to quickly identify and fix bugs.
• Lead user acceptance and staging sign-off for major releases, coordinating with product and engineering teams.
• Conduct knowledge-sharing sessions, pairing, and test-plan reviews to elevate quality across engineering teams.
• Contribute to the team's evolving asynchronous quality practices, integrating quality as an ongoing discipline.
• Collaborate with external partners to innovate and expand the application.

Requirements

• 5 or more years of experience with quality metrics, understanding their trade-offs, and combining them for a holistic view of product quality.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, version control, APIs, and the functionality of large-scale web applications.
• Experience applying AI tools to test planning, issue triage, automation, or other quality workflows, or equivalent experience with emerging tools.
• Demonstrated ability to lead quality-focused projects and initiatives across multiple teams or broader engineering organizations.
• Clear and effective communication skills, both written and verbal, with a proactive approach to collaboration and ownership of team outcomes.
• Hands-on experience with modern issue tracking software (e.g., Atlassian) and logging or observability platforms.
• A background in computer science or a related technical field, acquired through a degree, bootcamp, self-study, or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with release and off-cycle management processes, especially if interested in release rotation.
• Quality leadership experience in specialized areas like vendor management, crowd testing, accessibility (full WCAG list), or API testing.
• Technical travel experience with a background in GDS (Global Distribution Systems).
• Experience working with offshore or globally distributed teams.
• Mobile app testing experience.
• Efficient methods for using AI in quality practices.
• ISTQB certification or equivalent.

Skills & tools

• CI/CD
• Version control
• APIs
• AI tools for quality
• Atlassian (issue tracking)
• Logging platforms
• Observability platforms

Practical notes

• This role requires working from the Concord, MA office 3 days per week.
• Benefits include flexible work-from-anywhere for up to 20 days annually, mental health support (company-paid therapy and HeadSpace), a company-wide week off, no-meeting Fridays, paid parental leave, generous vacation, paid volunteer time, career development resources, travel discounts, employee resource groups, competitive retirement and health plans, free lunch two days a week, and quarterly social events.
• The compensation range for this Massachusetts-based role is $130,000 - $145,000 annually, with eligibility for an annual bonus.
• KAYAK offers a competitive base salary and benefits including health benefits, flexible spending account, retirement benefits, life insurance, paid time off (PTO, sick leave, medical leave, bereavement leave, floating holidays, paid holidays), and parental leave.
• Adjustments for the interview, application, or on the job are available upon request.