Software Engineer in Test

This role owns reliability. As our software grows — more capability, more supported configurations, more of a product surface that has to hold together end to end — reliability needs an explicit owner. Without one, engineers drift toward features and nobody owns the product not breaking. You'll build and maintain test automation and release gating across our software, and you'll be the person who deliberately goes looking for the edge cases the feature teams didn't think to test. You'll own the testing environments for our larger applications, and hold the release gate when something isn't ready. The near-term focus is our primary customer-facing application; over time you'll also extend comprehensive test coverage to our internal engineering tooling, where a larger end-to-end suite becomes increasingly valuable as we scale. Testing and reliability are the core of this role and remain so over the long term. That said, as you establish that foundation there will be room to take on broader software engineering work alongside it — a secondary, growing part of the role rather than a replacement for its core mandate.

Key Responsibilities

• Own test automation across our software: unit, integration, and end-to-end tests spanning the backend, the web front end, and the boundaries into our core engineering components.
• Own the testing environments for our larger applications — stand them up, keep them reproducible, and make them the trusted place releases are validated.
• Build and maintain the release-gating pipeline — define what must pass before any build ships, wire it into CI/CD, and hold the line when it doesn't.
• Deliberately hunt edge cases across the full range of supported configurations — the failure modes a real user is most likely to hit are rarely the ones covered by happy-path testing.
• Test our primary customer-facing workflow end to end, from input through final output.
• As a secondary effort, extend comprehensive test coverage and larger end-to-end testing to our internal engineering tooling — not the primary focus initially, but increasingly valuable as the tooling matures.
• Partner with the feature-focused engineers to scope testability into new features as they're built, rather than bolting it on afterward.
• Work with the broader engineering and optics teams to extend automated regression and conformance checks so releases are gated on more than manual spot-checks.
• Track and triage failures with clear reproduction steps, distinguishing flaky infrastructure from real regressions from spec drift.
• As a secondary part of the role, contribute to broader software engineering work alongside the testing mandate once the reliability foundation is established — in support of the core focus, not in place of it.
• As the product matures, help define what “release-ready” means for paying customers.

Required Qualifications

• US Citizenship
• BS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• 3+ years of professional software development or test-engineering experience, with meaningful time in test automation, CI/CD, or release engineering — not primarily manual QA
• Proficiency in Python; can write production-grade test code, not ad hoc scripts
• Experience with a modern web stack (REST APIs, a JS/TS frontend framework) sufficient to test across the full stack, not just at the API boundary
• Demonstrated ownership of testing environments — building and maintaining reproducible test/CI environments, with hands-on Docker, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and test automation
• Working knowledge of relational databases and SQL
• A track record of designing test strategies that find real edge cases, not just exercise the happy path
• Comfortable being the person who says “this isn't ready,” including under schedule pressure

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience, with demonstrated end-to-end ownership of a release-gating or CI/CD pipeline
• Frontend test automation experience — Playwright, Cypress, or similar — for browser-level end-to-end testing
• Experience testing systems with a scientific, simulation, or optimization component, where pass/fail criteria are numerically fuzzy rather than purely deterministic
• Familiarity with pytest, hypothesis or other property-based testing tools, or equivalent
• Experience owning containerized CI pipelines end to end
• Exposure to agentic or LLM-integrated systems
• General product or full-stack software engineering experience beyond testing and reliability — useful for the broader engineering work that grows alongside the core mandate over time
• Experience using AI coding-assistant or agentic development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate test and automation work

About Peak Nano

Established in 2016 to bring patented nanotechnology from the laboratory to commercial applications, Peak Nano is tackling challenges across the power grid, fusion, electric vehicles, aerospace, and defense. With AI-powered design and advanced nanolayered technology, Peak Nano’s drop-in-ready, industry-disrupting solutions dramatically boost systems’ performance.

Our NanoPlex™ films technology, protected by 20+ global patents, is designed and engineered in the U.S., with a secure supply chain from allied nations, reducing dependence on foreign suppliers. These purpose-built nanolayered solutions enable breakthroughs across critical industries, strengthening American energy independence, leadership, and national security.