We are seeking a Senior QA Engineer for a contract position (6+ months) based in Helena, Montana. You will join a respected, globally-focused institutional investment management organization that invests across major asset classes including public equity, private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and fixed-income instruments. This role offers the opportunity to work alongside diverse, high-caliber colleagues in a fast-paced, intellectually challenging environment while contributing to important social purpose. Responsibilities Design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks and scripts with independence, improving efficiency and test coverage to enable business capabilities in an Agile environment that includes business and technology partners. Drive a shift-left approach to software validation, guiding the team to apply automation themselves rather than handing it off to QA/QE. Participate in product design and development to ensure quality is built in from the beginning. Monitor the effectiveness of test automation and drive improvements through analysis at various stages, ensuring stability, efficiency, and scalability. Define and execute test plans, test cases and scripts, identify defects, analyze test results, and partner with developers to ensure products and services meet quality standards. Apply advanced understanding of engineering best practices and drive continuous improvement across the team through coaching and influencing. Adhere to Agile software development lifecycle principles and execute related duties as required. Foster collaboration and mentorship, promoting a culture of feedback, learning, and professional growth. Maintain strong relationships with business partners, peer IT teams, and vendor partners. Qualifications Required Proven experience in software quality engineering, including functional, regression, and integration testing. Hands-on experience with test automation frameworks (e.g., Selenium, Pytest, or similar). Solid understanding of API testing (REST) and ability to write and maintain automated test suites. Experience with CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated tests into build and release workflows. Proficiency in Python or equivalent scripting language for test development. SQL proficiency for data validation, test data setup, and backend verification. Preferred Familiarity with financial services or trading platforms. Experience testing event-driven or message-queue-based systems (e.g., SQS, Kafka). Understanding of trade lifecycle and order management systems. AWS cloud testing experience. Performance and load testing exposure.