Quality Assurance Engineer

Talon Hiring Solutions has a client in the greater Birmingham, AL area that is seeking a hands-on Quality Assurance Engineer to serve as the independent quality gate for customer-facing applications. This role will validate stories, features, and bug fixes against acceptance criteria and the organization's Definition of Done, combining automated testing with risk-based manual and exploratory testing.

What You'll Do

• Serve as the independent quality gate for customer-facing applications, accepting or rejecting work items based on defined quality standards.
• Collaborate with Product Owners, developers, and stakeholders to refine requirements and ensure work items meet the Definition of Ready before development begins.
• Validate features, enhancements, and bug fixes against business requirements, acceptance criteria, and the Definition of Done.
• Develop test plans and execute functional, regression, negative, boundary, end-to-end, exploratory, and risk-based testing.
• Own and manage the QA environment, including promoting builds from Development to QA for validation.
• Review automated test coverage and results to identify gaps, regressions, and quality risks.
• Leverage approved AI/agentic workflows to support test planning, requirements analysis, exploratory testing, investigation, and documentation.
• Perform hands-on manual testing of critical workflows across web, mobile, and Windows applications.
• Investigate legacy applications and unfamiliar functionality, even when documentation or automated coverage is limited.
• Document defects with clear reproduction steps, supporting evidence, and actionable details for development teams.
• Utilize automated UI and API testing to validate application functionality and reduce regression risk.
• Participate in Agile meetings, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Collaborate with development teams throughout the SDLC while maintaining an independent perspective on quality.
• Raise quality concerns when requirements are not satisfied and confidently block acceptance when necessary.

What You'll Bring

• 3+ years of hands-on software QA experience or equivalent demonstrated capability.
• Experience working in an Agile, sprint-based SDLC environment.
• Demonstrated experience independently testing customer-facing web, mobile, and Windows applications.
• Strong knowledge of functional, exploratory, regression, negative, boundary, and risk-based testing.
• Ability to translate requirements and acceptance criteria into effective test cases and testing strategies.
• Experience making and defending evidence-based accept/reject decisions.
• Experience using AI coding agents or strong aptitude for incorporating AI-assisted/agentic workflows into QA practices.
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar, complex, or poorly documented legacy applications.
• Strong defect documentation skills with clear, reproducible, and actionable reporting.
• Working knowledge of SPA web applications, REST APIs, relational databases, and modern identity management.
• Familiarity with automated UI testing frameworks such as Playwright.
• Experience with API testing tools such as Bruno or Postman.
• Experience using browser developer tools for network, console, and client-side troubleshooting.
• Experience testing mobile applications.
• Working knowledge of Azure DevOps, Git, and CI/CD test results.
• Strong written communication, critical thinking, organization, and time-management skills.
• Confidence to challenge assumptions, raise quality concerns, and block acceptance when quality or requirements are not met.