QA Automation Technical Lead

Job Description:

Our mission is to redefine the home experience with tech and services to create a smarter, greener, safer home that saves our customers money every month.

In this role, you'll set the technical direction for automated testing of Vivint's camera and video-device ecosystem and lead the engineers who build and maintain it. You will partner closely with camera firmware, video platform, cloud, mobile, QA, hardware, and product teams to shape test strategy, raise the technical bar across the automation function, and deliver reliable, secure, high-quality video experiences across cameras, panels, bridges, and connected services.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical strategy and architecture for automated camera and video testing across device, firmware, API, mobile, cloud, and end-to-end system scenarios.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of SDETs; set the technical bar for code quality, video test design, and automation best practices.
• Own the roadmap for camera and video automation frameworks, lab infrastructure, simulators, and tooling; evaluate and champion new technologies.
• Guide the team in reviewing camera and video test plans and prioritizing scenarios for automation based on customer impact, risk, and repeatability.
• Drive systemic reduction of test flakiness and technical debt, including instability caused by networks, timing, media pipelines, device state, and shared lab dependencies.
• Lead code reviews and establish standards for validating live video, recorded clips, event-triggered capture, playback, audio/video synchronization, latency, and video quality.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for complex camera, streaming, connectivity, firmware, cloud, and hardware/software integration issues.
• Partner with camera firmware, video platform, cloud, mobile, hardware, and manual quality teams on integration strategy, observability, and cross-team troubleshooting.
• Represent camera and video test engineering in architecture, feature, and release planning discussions, influencing quality, testability, and production-readiness decisions.
• Champion AI-assisted engineering practices for test generation, failure analysis, video-quality evaluation, and automation maintenance.

Required Experience:

• 6+ years of professional test automation experience with embedded, IoT, camera, video, or connected-device systems, including leading technical initiatives or mentoring engineers.
• 5+ years of experience with Python and building maintainable test frameworks, libraries, and diagnostic tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction and influence camera, cloud, mobile, firmware, and quality teams without direct authority.
• Proven ability to take initiative and drive complex, cross-functional video-quality projects to completion.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical abilities, including isolating failures across devices, networks, media pipelines, applications, and cloud services.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to lead and align cross-functional teams.
• Experience leveraging AI tools for software design, test development, failure analysis, and code review, including effective prompt engineering and model/tool selection.
• Solid understanding of embedded camera and IoT systems, device lifecycle, networking, and device-to-cloud communication fundamentals.
• Hands-on experience with Linux-based devices, logs, services, processes, resource constraints, and system-level troubleshooting.
• Deep familiarity with Git, Docker, and GitLab CI/CD for automated testing and deployment, with experience shaping standards for their use.
• Ability to troubleshoot camera hardware, firmware, networking, streaming, cloud, and application integration challenges and guide others through similar issues.
• Comfortable managing competing priorities across a team and consistently delivering high-quality work in a fast-paced environment.

Preferred Experience with the Following Technologies:

• Experience testing IP cameras, video doorbells, camera bridges, network video recorders, or similar connected video devices.
• Knowledge of live streaming, recorded video, clip generation, playback, thumbnails, event-based recording, and cloud video storage workflows.
• Familiarity with video and real-time communication technologies such as H.264/H.265, WebRTC, RTSP, RTP, ONVIF, or related media protocols.
• Experience validating video quality, startup time, latency, frame rate, resolution, bitrate, packet loss, buffering, audio/video synchronization, and stream recovery.
• Strong understanding of Wi-Fi, Ethernet, TCP/IP, DNS, NAT, VPN, bandwidth constraints, and network impairment testing.
• Experience testing computer-vision or camera events such as motion detection, person/package detection, detection zones, and notifications.
• Familiarity with camera firmware updates, provisioning, pairing, device replacement, configuration, and recovery workflows.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop systems, camera labs, controllable lighting or motion setups, network emulation, and production-like test environments.
• Experience building observability and diagnostics using device logs, cloud logs, metrics, traces, packet captures, and media artifacts.
• Track record of improving reliability and reducing flaky tests in large-scale, asynchronous, event-driven automation suites.
• Experience building, owning, or scaling shared camera/video automation frameworks and tools.
• Prior experience in a technical lead, staff engineer, or similar leadership role.

Why Join Us

Shape the quality strategy for camera and video technology used by millions of customers to monitor, protect, and stay connected to their homes. Be part of a collaborative team solving complex device, networking, streaming, cloud, and customer-experience challenges at scale.

Perks

• Free daily lunch and drinks on site
• Paid holidays and flexible paid time away
• Employee/Friends/Family Discounts
• Onsite health clinic, gym, gaming tables
• Medical/dental/vision/life coverage & 24/7 Medical Hotline
• 401(k) + Employer Match