QA Engineer

About the job

QA Engineer

Test Automation, Manual Validation & Quality Ownership

Mumbai (On-site) | Full-time | 3-5 years

About the role

Unico Connect is an AI-first technology partner that builds custom mobile, web, and AI products for clients across multiple geographies. We are hiring a QA Engineer with strong automation experience who will own quality across customer engagements, balancing manual exploratory testing with automated coverage across UI, API, and integration tiers.

The mandatory requirement for this role is hands-on production experience designing and maintaining automated test suites alongside manual exploratory testing, with ownership of quality on at least one live customer engagement. The role is hands-on. Expect to design test strategies, build and maintain Playwright or Cypress suites, write API test suites, integrate tests into CI, manage test data, and partner closely with engineers and product. AI-driven products require additional rigour: candidates should be comfortable evaluating non-deterministic outputs, building regression suites for AI features, and applying visual regression where appropriate. A typical week includes a release validation pass, a Playwright suite refactor, an API test build for a new service, and a working session with engineering on test data.

Responsibilities

• Test strategy and planning: Own the test strategy for assigned engagements. Define coverage across unit, integration, end-to-end, performance, and exploratory tiers.
• Test automation: Build and maintain automated test suites using Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium for web UI and Postman, REST Assured, or pytest for APIs.
• CI integration: Integrate automated tests into CI pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI). Drive fast, reliable feedback loops for engineers.
• Manual and exploratory testing: Execute manual exploratory passes on every release. Catch issues that automation cannot.
• AI feature validation: Test AI-driven features where outputs are non-deterministic. Build golden datasets, regression suites, semantic checks, and tolerance bands for accuracy.
• Visual regression and cross-browser: Run visual regression suites using Percy, Chromatic, or Applitools. Cover cross-browser and responsive scenarios.
• Defect management: File precise, reproducible bugs in Jira or equivalent. Drive triage, retest, and regression.

Requirements

• Hands-on production QA ownership (mandatory). Must have personally owned quality on at least one live customer engagement, with responsibility for test strategy, automation, and release sign-off. Coursework, internships, and pure manual testing roles alone do not qualify.
• 3 to 5 years of hands-on QA experience with both manual and automation work.
• Test automation depth. Production experience with Playwright (preferred), Cypress, or Selenium for web UI automation. Comfortable maintaining suites at scale, not just writing one-off tests.
• API testing. Hands-on with Postman, REST Assured, pytest, or equivalent. Comfortable writing assertions, parameterising tests, and integrating into CI.
• Programming fluency. Strong with at least one of JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python for automation scripting.
• SQL and database familiarity. Able to write queries to validate data, build test data sets, and debug issues.
• CI/CD integration. Hands-on with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins for automated test execution.
• Defect management. Hands-on with Jira, TestRail, Zephyr, or equivalent.
• Strong written and spoken English communication. Able to write precise bug reports, communicate with engineers and product managers, and present quality status to stakeholders.

Nice to have: visual regression testing (Percy, Chromatic, Applitools); performance and load testing (k6, JMeter); exposure to testing AI or LLM-driven features; mobile test automation (Appium); accessibility testing.