We are looking for Sr. SDET engineers with experience in supporting mission-critical applications, who are excited about building solutions that enhance automation, stability, and release processes across multiple systems. You will work closely with engineering teams to identify and address common issues, drive solutions, and improve overall release quality and reliability. This role requires hands-on engagement, troubleshooting, and automation development. You will work within the ANCHOR team, managing release processes and automation to maintain a seamless and efficient pipeline. The team operates an on-call support rotation, and you will be responsible for maintaining release quality and pipeline health. Your work will directly impact Kuiper’s ability to deliver high-quality, reliable releases efficiently.

Export Control Requirement:
Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Key job responsibilities
This role sits at the intersection of test automation, CI/CD, release engineering, and operational reliability.

1. CI/CD Pipeline Ownership & Stability
- Own the daily build, test, and release pipelines end to end
- Monitor pipeline health, stability, and performance
- Diagnose and resolve pipeline failures (build, test, infra, dependency issues)
- Reduce flaky tests and nondeterministic failures
- Improve pipeline speed, reliability, and signal-to-noise ratio

2. Release Engineering & Software Delivery
- Manage software build and release activities across environments
- Track releases, validate readiness, and enforce quality gates
- Support complex, multi-stage release processes
- Ensure releases meet quality, compliance, and reliability standards
- Partner with Dev, QA, and Ops during releases and hotfixes

3. Test Automation at Scale
- Design, implement, and maintain automated test frameworks (API, integration, system, end-to-end)
- Integrate automated tests seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines
- Ensure test coverage aligns with risk, not just code coverage
- Build tooling to improve test execution efficiency and observability

4. Operational Support & Incident Response
- Respond to pipeline, release, and production-impacting issues
- Participate in triage, on-call rotations, and incident resolution
- Debug high-complexity failures across code, infrastructure, and environments
- Drive root cause analysis (RCA) and preventative fixes

5. Reliability & Continuous Improvement
- Create automated solutions to improve reliability, scalability, and efficiency
- Identify systemic issues and eliminate manual processes
- Introduce metrics, dashboards, and alerts for build/test/release health
- Champion best practices in testing, automation, and release management

6. Technical Leadership & Collaboration (Senior-Level Expectation)
- Influence architecture and design for testability and reliability
- Mentor junior engineers on automation and CI/CD practices
- Partner closely with DevOps, Platform, and Infrastructure teams
- Drive standards and long-term quality strategy

A day in the life
A Sr. SDET works closely with development, QA, and DevOps teams to ensure the reliability and quality of daily builds, automated tests, and release pipelines. They spend much of their time monitoring CI/CD pipelines, troubleshooting build and test failures, supporting software releases, and improving test automation and operational tooling. This role is hands-on and execution-focused, with opportunities to grow toward technical ownership and leadership.

On a typical day, you will:
- Monitor daily builds, automated test runs, and CI/CD pipeline health
- Investigate and resolve build, test, and pipeline failures
- Support software build and release activities across environments
- Participate in issue triage and help resolve operational or release-blocking issues
- Analyze failures, identify root causes, and implement fixes to prevent recurrence
- Develop, maintain, and improve automated test solutions integrated into pipelines
- Work with developers and DevOps engineers to improve testability, reliability, and release efficiency
- Contribute to documentation, dashboards, and metrics for build and release tracking

About the team
The ANCHOR team (Automated Navigation and Control of Releases) is focused on streamlining and standardizing the release process. This team manages releases for all Payload LRUs, including Ground LRUs, ensuring consistent release quality, pipeline health, and process efficiency. The team’s charter includes creating release automation, documenting changes, tracking versioned releases, and supporting the transition to a common versionset structure as a long-term strategy. ANCHOR operates autonomously, focused on improving time-to-release, automation reliability, and release transparency.