Staff Software Engineer, Quality Engineering

Description

Salary Range
$180,000 – $200,000 / year

Work Policy
Remote-first (United States)

Core Tech Stack
TypeScript/Node (NestJS), React, PostgreSQL, AWS, Redis, Playwright, Claude/MCP

Experience Level
Staff-Level

Job Type
Contract

Second Nature is standing up a small, high-leverage quality engineering practice, starting with this Staff Software Engineer role that works across every product team (or “pod”) in the company. The guiding principle is simple: developers own their own automated tests, and this person raises the testing capability of the whole organization rather than acting as a manual safety net or gatekeeper. This is a craft role for someone who genuinely wants to do quality engineering long-term, not a stepping stone toward a different kind of engineering job.

About Second Nature

Second Nature has built the world’s first Resident Experience Platform, making resident onboarding, resident services, and extra revenue streams effortless for property managers — turning the usual hassle of setting up utilities, renters insurance, air filter delivery, pest control, and more into something simple. The company is on a mission to turn friction into a genuine “triple win” for residents, property managers, and investors, and has grown to more than 290 employees.

What You’ll Do

• Own the automated-testing strategy and frameworks across the UI product, starting with the consumer-facing Resident Onboarding flow (highest customer risk) and then expanding into Command Center, building critical-flow coverage directly into the delivery pipeline so engineering owns it going forward.
• Make quality something you can actually measure — build and maintain a risk-weighted registry of critical user flows and report live coverage numbers (percent of critical flows tested, percent of screens exercised, percent of real production traffic covered) through dashboards instead of quarterly slide decks.
• Lead an AI-first approach to testing, teaching Claude how and why Second Nature’s systems work, and building skills and MCP-based tooling (JIRA, internal APIs, direct database inspection) so complex scenarios — especially partner integrations — can run rapidly and reliably instead of by hand.
• Modernize integration testing, moving partner verification away from manual, web-based checking toward API-based automation, and help close long-standing gaps in environment setup and testability.
• Coach rather than gatekeep — get embedded in design discussions and PR review, help engineers own their own automated tests well, and push teams to build quality in from the start.
• Drive the broader Quality Enablement practice, partnering with engineering directors, platform teams, and product stakeholders to surface and prioritize testability gaps.
• Build guardrails that actually hold — CI coverage ratchets, deploy-gate health checks, and flake reduction — and make escaped production defects visible, tied to specific user flows and tracked against change-failure rate.

What You’ll Need

• Staff-level engineering experience — deep, hands-on background designing, coding, and owning test automation and frameworks across unit, integration, contract, and browser/e2e layers.
• A genuine passion for quality engineering as a craft, with a real track record of building high-quality automated testing — this needs to be the work you want to keep doing, not a detour.
• An AI-first mindset — you already reach for AI tools (the company builds on Claude) to accelerate and harden testing through agent workflows, skills, and MCP tooling, and you’re excited to help shape how AI transforms quality engineering.
• Excellent communication skills — this role touches every team at the company, so you’ll need to align engineers, PMs, and leaders, and coach effectively across both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A self-starter mindset with real ownership — high autonomy, low process overhead, and the ability to take an ambiguous quality problem and drive it to a shipped, measurable result without being told to.
• Strong AWS and Node/TypeScript skills, and comfort working across distributed, service-oriented systems and testing across service boundaries.
• Availability to work an 8-to-5 EST schedule.

Nice to Have

• Experience standing up or scaling a quality engineering practice from scratch.
• Performance or load testing experience.
• Experience with data-integrity testing against relational databases (PostgreSQL).
• Background in PropTech, real estate tech, or B2B2C SaaS.

Remote Work Requirements

This is a remote-first, work-from-home position. To succeed in it, you’ll need to be fully available and focused during your scheduled hours, have a quiet and professional workspace, have reliable high-speed internet, and be able to attend Second Nature’s bi-annual in-person company meetings (travel costs reimbursed per company policy).

Benefits

Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance; a 401(k) plan; the ability to work remotely from anywhere in the US; open PTO and sick days; and the opportunity to help build a fast-growing company in a brand-new category.