Description

We are hiring a Senior Quality Assurance Lead Engineer to own product quality across two mobile efforts: stabilizing our internal and external mobile applications through its platform migration, and building the quality foundation for a new customer-facing application expected to serve 500K–1M users, from the ground up.

This is an individual-contributor role for a practitioner, not a program manager. You will personally extend the test strategy, extend the test strategy, grow our automated test pool strategically, sit in production telemetry to catch and verify issues, and act as the primary advocate for the customer experience. You will be the single dedicated quality voice for these products and are expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy and judgment.

The mandate is durable coverage of what actually matters to users — not test count, and not coverage for its own sake.

• Unit-level test authoring for application code stays with the engineers who write it. This role owns integration and above. We enforce unit coverage as an engineering merge gate so this role is never the backstop for it.

• Detection vs. remediation: This role owns finding, characterizing, and advocating for defects. Engineering owns fixing them. The quality engineer is not the owner of every quality problem — they are the person who ensures problems are found, understood, and not shipped.

• Authority to gate releases. This role can hold a release on customer-risk grounds, and that call is backed by leadership.
  
  

Responsibilities:

• Quality Strategy

  • Define the test strategy, risk model, and release-quality bar for FieldTool v2 and the new consumer app.

  • Prioritize testing by customer impact and likelihood of failure; deliberately decline low-value coverage and be able to defend what is not tested.

  • For the greenfield app, architect the test pyramid, environments, and quality gates from scratch.

• Test Design & Execution (hands-on)

  • Personally build and maintain user experience and acceptance tests.

  • Build a lean, durable critical-path E2E suite — not a brittle UI suite that consumes all maintenance time.

  • Validate behavior on real devices under real-world conditions: degraded networks, backgrounding, thermal stress, offline/online sync, permission states.

• Automation & CI Infrastructure

  • Design release gates and (for the consumer app) staged/phased rollout criteria, including crash-free-rate and key-journey thresholds.

  • Continuously improve signal-to-noise: fast, reliable, meaningful tests over volume.

• Production Observability & Scale

  • Use production telemetry, crash reporting, and RUM-style monitoring to detect escaped defects and verify fixes in the wild.

  • For the consumer app, own quality at scale: performance/load considerations, crash-free rate, device-matrix coverage, and rollout health for a 500K–1M user base.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration

  • Partner directly with the iOS engineers and the Sr. Mobile Engineering Manager to shorten the cycle from defect discovery to verified fix.

  • Represent quality in release reviews and risk discussions; surface and characterize risk clearly and early.

• Metrics & Continuous Improvement

  • Define and track outcome metrics: defect escape/leakage rate on critical journeys, mean-time-to-detect in production, critical-journey automation coverage, regression duration, automation pass rate.

  • Use trend analysis to identify systemic issues and drive corrective action.

• Mentorship

  • Grow the retained manual QA tester(s) into a broader quality role over time, transferring durable patterns rather than holding knowledge.

  • Promote quality as a shared responsibility across the engineering team.

• Undertake additional assigned duties as requested.
  
  

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• None
  
  

Qualifications:

• High school diploma or GED required.
• 5+ years in software quality engineering, including ownership of test strategy and infrastructure as a hands-on practitioner.
• Demonstrated experience building quality processes and automation from the ground up, ideally for a consumer-facing product at meaningful scale.
• Track record protecting quality on a mobile product through significant change (rewrite, migration, or rapid growth).
• Experience growing or mentoring at least one other tester into automation.
• Mobile-first quality depth. Strong instinct for mobile failure modes: connectivity loss, backgrounding/OS-killed connections, thermal/battery, offline-first sync, partial state. iOS primary.
• Automation & CI. Mobile automation (e.g., XCUITest, WebdriverIO) and API-level automation; comfortable owning CI test integration. Web E2E tooling (Playwright/Cypress) a plus, not the core.
• Observability at scale. Crash reporting and production monitoring (e.g., Crashlytics/Sentry, Datadog/RUM); able to investigate and verify in production.
• Scale & performance. Familiarity with performance/load testing and staged-rollout/release-gate design for a large user base.
• Proficient in a scripting/test language (Swift, Python, TypeScript, or similar).
• Investigative, skeptical, customer-obsessed.
• Comfortable being the sole dedicated quality voice; high autonomy and sound independent judgment.
• Clear communicator who can characterize risk and influence a release decision.
• Mentoring presence; promotes shared ownership of quality.
• Spanish speaking bi-lingual candidates are encouraged to apply.
• Candidates may be requested to complete position specific skills assessments.
• Applicants must be either a U.S. Citizen or eligible to work in the U.S.
• Requires the ability to satisfactorily complete a background check.
  
  

Working Settings:

• Full-time Salaried Exempt, not eligible for overtime.

• Office hours are 8am-5pm, Monday through Friday, Central Time zone, additional hours may be required depending on priorities.

• This position is remote work eligible within the United States. Please be aware: the first week of employment includes mandatory in-person training. Remote start arrangements are not available.

• Also mandatory: One week a year of in-person training with the department.

• Potential for 5-15% travel, should the need arise.

• Prolonged periods sitting at a desk and working on a computer.

• Must be able to lift up to 15 pounds at times.
  
  

Compensation:

• The salary varies based on experience and qualifications, but typically ranges from $113,000 to $124,000 per year.

• Monthly Bonus Program - determined by the Company’s monthly revenue result and are paid on a “percent to plan” payout formula (90% = $300, 100% = $600, 110% = $900, 120% = $1,200).

• Monthly phone stipend in accordance with the Company’s cell phone policy, currently $120/month.

• Health, Dental, and Vision insurance.

• 401(k) plan with an employer match up to 4% starting the first day of employment.

• Company-paid Life Insurance with options for supplemental coverage.

• Fully paid Short-Term Disability provided by the Company.

• 3 Weeks of PTO annually (details shared during onboarding).

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP) - Eligible to purchase company stock at a discount after 90 days of employment, with enrollment opportunities each May and November.

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Summary

About Purple Wave

Visit us at: PurpleWave.com

Purple Wave Auction is a leader in the equipment auction industry focusing on construction, ag, fleet, and government equipment.  We are a data-driven, quickly changing and evolving, growing organization.  Our focus is on marketing the assets we sell for our customers to find the highest quality bidders for the best recoveries for our sellers.  We strive to make this transaction Straight, Simple, and Sold.  We live daily by our core values of trust, team, care, and passion to be the place people want to work and our customers want to return to for their equipment buying and selling needs for their businesses.

Purple Wave Auction is the largest no-reserve Internet auction company in the Midwest.

• We have over 300 employees, nearly doubling in size in the last three years.
• We have a robust tech team and continue to invest in progressive techniques to enhance our services.
• While working at Purple Wave, you will have the opportunity to help our mission of being the easiest, most straightforward place to buy and sell used equipment. 
• Purple Wave empowers its employees to solve problems effectively in a family-run business culture.
• We provide opportunities for continued education as you grow your career with tuition reimbursement. We have a generous benefits package in one of the fastest-growing companies in the area.

Purple Wave is looking for an enthusiastic person to join our growing team to support our customers as we bring our values of Trust, Team, Care and Passion to them. 

Purple Wave Auction Core Values:

• TRUST:  We are trustworthy…Our business depends upon our integrity and our customer’s ability to trust Purple Wave and its people:  to enforce a fair, transparent unreserved auction marketplace; to safeguard their bidding information; to give a full effort on behalf of their asset(s); We are transparent, accountable and fair.
• TEAM:  WE ARE A TEAM…We respect, support, appreciate and inspire each other; We communicate and follow-through; We need each other. We do our best work when we work together.
• CARE:  WE CARE…We care for our customers. We look out for their best interests. We work hard for them. We “go the extra mile”.
• PASSION:  WE ARE PASSIONATE…We are positive, we are enthusiastic, we take pride in our work, we own our responsibilities and we deliver; When we see problems, we fix them. We learn from our mistakes. We improve ourselves and Purple Wave every day; We believe Purple Wave can be the best marketplace for used equipment and we are committed to make it happen. 

Equal Opportunity Employer

Equal Opportunity is a Purple Wave, Inc. policy. It is our practice to select the best-qualified candidate for each position in the organization. No employee of the Company will discriminate against an applicant for employment or a fellow employee because of race, creed, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, or other physical or mental disability, military or veteran status. 

Notice of Background Check

As a condition of your employment, you will be required to sign the Company’s Authorization for Background Check, and to provide the Company with documents establishing your identity and right to work in the United States.