---
title: 'Senior QA Automation Engineer at Sustainment'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-sustainment-austin-texas-qkfymrb8mrj9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-13'
---

# Senior QA Automation Engineer at Sustainment

- **Company:** Sustainment
- **Location:** Austin Texas, United States
- **Posted:** 2026-08-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-13
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/sustainment/jobs/4706055006

## Job description

Company Overview: Sustainment is an AI-native software platform that helps US-based manufacturers easily find and work with the critical suppliers they need to build and manage their supply chains. Our vision is to reimagine American manufacturing as a hyperconnected, secure, and resilient ecosystem of local and regional suppliers who can more easily connect, interact, and do business with the industry and government customers that rely on them. We are a dual-use technology platform that supports both DoD and commercial customers in pursuit of our vision.

CLEARANCE REQUIREMENT: Candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret or Top Secret security clearance. This is a non-negotiable, hard requirement driven by our Department of War contractor obligations. Candidates who are not eligible will not be considered for this role.

Job Overview:

Sustainment builds B2B SaaS for manufacturing supply chains, serving both commercial customers and federal/defense programs. As we move to a daily release cadence, we need a senior, hands-on QA automation engineer to lead the charge toward a fully automated playwright test suite while keeping our releases fast and trustworthy.

This is a player-coach role - roughly 80% hands-on, 20% leadership. You'll spend most of your time testing and building automation, with a light leadership layer: mentoring a small QA team and owning our QA process. It is a testing-and-automation role first, and a leadership role second.

## What you'll do

Quality & automation (your core work)

- Drive the shift from mostly-manual testing to a comprehensive, fully automated playwright test suite. This is the north star of the role.
- Build, maintain, and scale automated tests (UI and API) and integrate them into our CI/CD pipeline so verification keeps pace with a daily release cadence.
- Contribute to manual and exploratory testing whenever it's needed, especially on releases and wherever automated coverage doesn't exist yet. You're willing to get in the trenches, not just architect from above.
- Stand up QA quality instrumentation (e.g., escaped-defect tracking) so we can measure the quality of what we ship, not just the speed.
- Champion AI-assisted testing as we scale toward AI-native development.

## Team leadership (~10–20% of your time)

- Mentor two QA engineers and raise the team's automation capability.
- Own and standardize QA process and standards; test plans, entry/exit criteria, a clear bounce-back vs. hold guideline, and QA's definition of done.
- Act as the QA operational lead and a trusted second to the Director of Engineering, so day-to-day QA runs without needing to route everything through leadership.

## Qualifications

- Senior-level experience in QA and test automation (6+ years).
- Deep hands-on skill with modern test-automation frameworks (Playwright preferred, Cypress, or similar) and API testing.
- Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitLab a plus).
- A track record of building an automated suite up from partial or manual coverage.
- Genuinely comfortable staying hands-on. You want to test and build, not step out of the tools.
- Some experience mentoring engineers or owning QA processes for a small team.
- Comfort with Jira for test and defect management.

## Nice to have

- Experience with AI-assisted testing tools and workflows.
- Delivery into regulated/federal environments (FedRAMP, CUI, DoD); we ship into government spaces.
- B2B SaaS and/or manufacturing / supply-chain domain experience.
- Exposure to data or analytics testing.
- Experience testing agentic / multi-agent systems and prompt-driven workflows.
- AI-assisted test generation - using LLMs or agents to write and maintain tests (exactly where we're taking QA).
- ML / data-quality testing - model-output validation, extraction/classification accuracy metrics.

Testing and evaluating GenAI / LLM-powered features; building evaluation harnesses, ground-truth datasets, and scoring for non-deterministic model outputs (accuracy, precision/recall, LLM-as-judge).

What this role is and isn't

- It is: a senior, hands-on automation engineer who tests daily, builds and owns our automation, and provides lightweight leadership and mentorship for a small team.
- It isn't: a pure people-management seat. You'll set standards and mentor, but daily testing and automation are the heart of the job. If your goal is to move out of hands-on work into full-time management, this isn't the right fit and that's okay.

## Team & context

You'll join a small, high-trust QA team (two engineers today) inside engineering, reporting to the Director of Engineering. We're moving from biweekly to daily releases, we build for both commercial and regulated federal customers, and we're actively adopting AI-assisted development and testing. It's a place to build the QA function into something modern, automated, and measured with real ownership from day one. Sustainment offers a competitive benefits package for full time employees including medical, dental, vision, paid time off, company holidays, and 401K matching.

Sustainment is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class.

Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

Sustainment participates in[E-Verify.](https://www.e-verify.gov/)

## About Sustainment

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Sustainment builds AI-driven software to modernize sourcing, procurement, and supplier management for U.S. commercial and defense manufacturing supply chains.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, Public Benefit Corporation & Certified B Corp)
- **Headquarters**: Austin, Texas, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Bret Boyd (CEO & Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Software Development / Supply Chain Technology for Manufacturing
- **Target Customers**: B2B, serving Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Contract Manufacturers, Federal & Defense procurement teams (DoD, DLA), and state/local government organizations.
- **Mission**: To strengthen American manufacturing by making it easier for manufacturers to work together, compete effectively, and build resilient supply chains.

## Products & Services
- **Sustainment SRM (Supplier Relationship Management)**: A dual-use technology platform that helps commercial and DoD teams streamline sourcing, procurement, and supplier management. It organizes key data, automates workflows (e.g., RFx), and provides real-time visibility into supplier performance. The product is a SaaS platform designed for both industry and defense.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available.
- **Total Funding**: **$14.2M** across 3 rounds.
    - Seed Round (Nov 2020): $2.2M led by Blackhorn Ventures.
    - Series A (Aug 2022): $12.0M led by Unless.
- **Key Metric**: The Sustainment community has grown to **50K+ manufacturers** (as of 2025). The company employs **31 people** (+18.3% YoY growth).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Blackhorn Ventures, Unless. Key partners include the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and 50+ federal, state, and local organizations.
- **Growth Signals**: Awarded the first logistics SBIR Phase III contract by the US Air Force; first DoD innovation contract in 2020; first state adoption to power its manufacturing network in 2022; community grew from 30K to 50K manufacturers between 2024 and 2025.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Dual-Use Focus**: Purpose-built for both commercial manufacturing and defense supply chains, a niche with high barriers to entry and deep regulatory complexity.
- **Public Benefit Corporation & B Corp**: Their legal structure and certification signal a strong commitment to a social mission (strengthening U.S. manufacturing) beyond profit, which aligns with government and customer values.
- **Deep Government Integration**: Early and sustained contracts with the DoD and DLA provide a strong moat and recurring revenue from hard-to-replace government relationships.
- **AI-Driven Workflows**: Leverages AI to automate sourcing and procurement, augmenting the work of human supply chain professionals rather than replacing them.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) by automating workflows and increasing throughput for suppliers.
- Growing the network of registered manufacturers (targeting 10x U.S. manufacturing output).
- Deepening partnerships with federal, state, and local government entities to drive adoption.
- Continuing to develop data science and AI capabilities to solve "toughest sourcing and procurement headaches."

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-Driven Culture**: As a Public Benefit Corporation, the company is legally obligated to prioritize its mission of improving U.S. manufacturing, offering purpose-driven work.
- **Company Values**: Emphasizes "Trust is our operating system," "Courage to risk going first," "Service is our success metric," "Integrity at all costs," and "Humility in our approach."
- **Agile Working Environment**: The company promotes an agile working environment, though specific remote/hybrid policy details were not explicit on the careers page.
- **Benefits & Perks**: Includes 401K match, Flexible PTO, Healthcare/Dental/Vision, and a referral bonus.
- **Engineering Culture**: The VP of Technology (Zachary Tschirhart) has a strong background in HPC and AI, and the company is actively hiring for Back-end Software Engineers, suggesting a focus on building robust, scalable technology.
- **Growth Trajectory**: With 18.3% headcount growth year-over-year and a rapidly expanding community of manufacturers, the company is in a growth phase, offering opportunities for impact.

## Sources
1. [sustainment.com](https://www.sustainment.com/)
2. [sustainment.com/company](https://www.sustainment.com/company)
3. [sustainment.com/company/careers](https://www.sustainment.com/company/careers)
4. [job-boards.greenhouse.io](http://job-boards.greenhouse.io/sustainment)
5. [linkedin.com/company/sustainment](https://www.linkedin.com/company/sustainment)

## Other roles at Sustainment

- [Product Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-sustainment-austin-texas-zbmf2p87jqds) — Austin Texas, United States
- [Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/account-executive-sustainment-austin-texas-9x1685337ekf) — Austin Texas, United States
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-chartbeat-inc-czechia-bkjwbhpwcq2c) — Czechia
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-zafin-trivandrum-5503d3sgvg7a) — Trivandrum, India
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-encora-peru-xsdspexgcfdt) — Peru
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-encora-peru-kd2p79y48j7s) — Peru
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-coderoad-latin-america-hhbbgwf4jha2) — Latin America
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-axi-bengaluru-ver9c184p3ze) — Bengaluru, India
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-pave-bank-kuala-lumpur-mgwms3h0ca8m) — Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
- [Senior QA Automation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-qa-automation-engineer-buildout-remote-8d0sma90vmjd)