Senior Full Stack Engineer

About Private Identity

Private Identity (“PrivateID”) builds privacy-preserving identity and age-assurance technology — verification that confirms who someone is, or that they meet an age requirement, without storing the underlying personal data.

Our software runs in production at consumer scale for some of the largest companies in the world, and we hold ourselves to the quality bar this demands: Private Identity is ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and SOC 2 Type II certified, and a Kantara-certified NIST SP 800-63 credential service provider.

We’re a small, senior, international team, HQ in Washington DC, who work in the open, write things down, and ship software that works the first time.

The role

You’ll be a Senior Fullstack Engineer embedded three days a week with a large customer’s in-store platform team in Woonsocket, RI, with the other two days working remotely.

You’ll sit at the intersection of product engineering, quality, and customer delivery. You’ll work directly with our engineering team to take new releases from code to customer: validating builds, building automated coverage, improving our test infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, and making sure both teams have a clear picture of what’s ready to ship.

The role has a strong quality-engineering focus, but this is an engineering position. You’ll write TypeScript, build and maintain automation frameworks, work across UI and APIs, integrate testing into CI/CD, investigate issues on Linux and Android, and collaborate closely with engineers on both sides of the relationship.

You’ll also be our technical presence inside the customer account. You’ll learn how their systems and workflows operate, understand how they use what we build, and bring that context back to our distributed engineering team. Clear written communication is as important as technical ability: you’ll be expected to leave behind useful context, actionable defects, test results, and decisions.

If you enjoy owning problems end to end, working across the stack, bringing structure to ambiguous situations, and being the trusted technical link between two engineering teams, you’ll do well here.

Who you’ll work with

The customer’s engineering team is small, which means you’ll work directly with the people building and operating their platform. You’ll become a familiar face quickly — pairing on reproductions, troubleshooting issues, aligning on test coverage, and helping determine whether a release is ready for production.

Our own team is small and international, with engineers across South America, India, Europe, and the US. We work asynchronously across time zones and rely heavily on clear written communication, focused calls, and individual ownership.

Three days a week, you’ll be the in-person technical presence for our team at the customer site. The other two days, you’ll continue that work remotely with our distributed engineering organization. You’ll need to be equally comfortable in both environments.

What you’ll do

Own quality from build to release

• Receive new releases from our engineering leads, including Ubuntu workstation software and a companion Android application.
• Install and validate builds on real test hardware and run focused smoke testing across installation, upgrades, first launch, core workflows, camera, and video functionality.
• Build and maintain automated UI and API coverage using Playwright and TypeScript.
• Use automation as the primary mechanism for repeatable regression coverage, while applying focused manual testing where human judgment adds value.
• Validate releases against requirements and acceptance criteria and provide a clear, evidence-based recommendation on release readiness.
• Investigate failures, reproduce issues, collect logs and other evidence, and work with engineers to identify root causes.
• Write high-quality defect reports that give engineers enough context to act without requiring a meeting or hand-off.

Build the automation and engineering infrastructure

• Design, develop, and maintain our Playwright-based UI and API automation framework.
• Write production-quality TypeScript/JavaScript, treating test code as software that deserves the same engineering discipline as application code.
• Develop API tests using Playwright’s request layer, Postman/Bruno, or equivalent tooling.
• Integrate smoke and regression suites into CI/CD, primarily using GitHub Actions.
• Improve the speed, reliability, maintainability, and observability of our automated test infrastructure.
• Identify gaps in coverage and build the tooling and tests needed to close them.
• Use AI-assisted development tools such as Claude Code and Playwright AI locators to accelerate test creation, refactoring, debugging, and documentation while maintaining engineering quality.
• Contribute to test strategy, quality engineering practices, and technical decisions within an Agile/Scrum environment.

Work directly with the customer

• Work side by side with the customer’s engineers and QA team to understand their platform, workflows, and operational requirements.
• Pair on reproductions, troubleshoot problems, and align on test coverage, standards, and release criteria.
• Become a trusted technical point of contact when something doesn’t behave as expected.
• Bring customer feedback and technical context back to our engineering team early, clearly, and in writing.
• Participate in production incident response when needed. Occasionally that means an early morning or late evening, particularly when the customer is dealing with an operational issue.
• Help both teams understand not just what is broken, but why it matters and what should happen next.

Bring structure and ownership

• Maintain clear documentation around defects, workflows, test plans, coverage, runbooks, and operational processes.
• Keep an accurate picture of what has been tested, what remains outstanding, and where risks exist.
• Make hand-offs across teams and time zones easy by documenting decisions and context as you go.
• Manage your area of the engagement with a high degree of autonomy: organized backlog, clear priorities, visible risks, and no surprises.
• Look for opportunities to improve how we build, test, release, and support the product — not just the individual build in front of you.

What you’ll need

• 5+ years of professional software engineering.
• Strong, current TypeScript/JavaScript skills.
• Strong hands-on experience with Playwright; it is the primary automation platform for this role.
• Experience building and maintaining automated UI and API test suites.
• Solid understanding of API testing and automation, using Playwright’s request layer, Postman/Bruno, or equivalent tools.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines; GitHub Actions experience is preferred.
• Comfortable working from the Linux command line and debugging applications on Ubuntu.
• Comfortable working with Android devices, including installing builds, collecting logs, and reproducing issues.
• Experience diagnosing problems across application, API, browser, device, and infrastructure boundaries.
• Strong software-engineering fundamentals: version control, code review, debugging, refactoring, maintainability, and testable design.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools such as Claude Code or Playwright AI capabilities to accelerate development.
• Good judgment around release readiness: you can distinguish between a cosmetic issue, a recoverable defect, and a release-blocking problem, and explain your reasoning clearly.
• Excellent written communication and documentation habits.
• Comfortable working directly with customers and collaborating across organizational boundaries.
• Highly self-directed and organized. You naturally create structure where it doesn’t exist and surface risks before they become surprises.
• Comfortable working asynchronously with an international, distributed engineering team.
• Able to work on-site in Woonsocket, RI on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with the other two days remote.

Nice to have

• Prior experience as a client-facing, embedded, consulting, or solutions engineer.
• Experience with Svelte or other modern frontend frameworks.
• Experience with FFmpeg, v4l2, WebRTC, camera pipelines, or other video/media tooling.
• Experience testing or debugging hardware-integrated software.
• Experience in regulated or enterprise environments such as healthcare, pharmacy, retail, financial services, or similar.
• Familiarity with identity, authentication, biometrics, age assurance, or related technologies.
• Experience with performance, accessibility, or security testing.
• Experience contributing to test architecture, developer tooling, or broader quality-engineering strategy.