Software Quality Engineer

The Senior Application Quality Engineer owns software quality assurance for enterprise business applications from requirements definition through production validation. Serving as the quality bridge between business analysts, developers, and business stakeholders, this role identifies gaps in requirements, establishes risk-based test coverage, performs hands-on validation, and provides evidence-based release-readiness recommendations. This position establishes repeatable testing practices and appropriate test automation. It is a dedicated software quality role, not an application development position or a substitute for business acceptance.Essential Job FunctionsPartner with business analysts before development begins to review requirements, business rules, dependencies, and measurable acceptance criteria; identify gaps and recommend improvements.Translate approved requirements into risk-based test strategies, traceable scenarios, test data, and expected outcomes before work moves to development or QA.Own functional, integration, end-to-end, regression, negative, and data-integrity testing for application changes, production corrections, and client projects.Validate end-to-end enterprise application workflows and cross-system impacts, including transactions, user-facing and administrative functions, reporting, scheduled interfaces, and client-specific business processes.Test APIs, file exchanges, scheduled/batch jobs, web interfaces, authentication flows, and upstream/downstream dependencies at the appropriate level.Reproduce defects; document clear steps, severity, supporting data, and expected versus actual results; collaborate with developers on correction and retest.Independently verify application behavior and data integrity through read-only SQL queries, test outputs, reports, and application interfaces; document discrepancies and refer code-level corrections to developers.