Lead/Senior SQA Analyst

Contiem headquarters is located in Annapolis, MD, with additional locations in the US and internationally in Sutton, UK, Chennai, India, and Sydney, Australia. Our elite team of subject matter experts works closely with clients to assess, optimize, and transform their content objectives and operations. Our global team allows us to support clients in 40 countries, including many of the world's largest companies and iconic brands, from various industries such as Government, Aerospace, Publishing, Consumer Products, Healthcare, Industrial, Technology, and Financial Services.

Position Summary

Contiem is seeking a highly skilled and experienced Lead/Senior SQA Analyst to join our team and support testing for our Web, Desktop, and mobile applications. As a Senior SQA Analyst, you will play a critical role in ensuring the quality, reliability, and usability of our documentation tools. Your primary responsibility will be to design, execute, and maintain testing strategies and test cases to validate the functionality and performance of our software applications.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Quality Ownership & Technical Leadership

• Own end-to-end quality of releases through comprehensive test planning, execution, and risk assessment.
• Define and drive test strategies, quality standards, risk-based testing approaches, and release readiness criteria across multiple product areas.
• Act as a technical escalation point; mentor colleagues on test case design, automation frameworks, and QA best practices.
• Collaborate with Product Management, Engineering, and Professional Services teams to influence product quality decisions.
• Conduct root cause analysis, track defect metrics, and drive continuous process improvements.
• Participate in release retrospectives, providing actionable testing insights to improve product quality.
• Champion quality advocacy across teams, ensuring adherence to standards and compliance requirements.

Test Strategy & Coverage

• Analyze requirements and user stories to identify gaps, ambiguities, and risks; design targeted test plans accordingly.
• Execute manual and automated tests across web, Windows desktop, mobile (iOS/Android), APIs, databases, and XML content.
• Validate XML against schemas/DTDs (e.g., S1000D, DITA, custom) to ensure product compliance.
• Perform accessibility testing (WCAG & EAA), performance testing (JMeter), functional, regression, and exploratory testing.
• Ensure test coverage across integration, system, and user acceptance testing phases.

Automation & CI/CD Excellence

• Architect and optimize scalable automation frameworks like Playwright and Selenium.
• Implement Power Automate flows to streamline testing workflows.
• Integrate and maintain automation within Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines for continuous quality validation.
• Maintain test data management strategies to support automation and regression testing.
• Assist in expanding automated coverage across UI, API, workflow, and data validation layers.
• Develop automation approaches for XML validation, publishing verification, and content quality checks.
• Analyze automation effectiveness and continuously improve test coverage.

Functional & Workflow Testing

• Design and execute comprehensive test plans, test cases, and test strategies for enterprise content management solutions.
• Validate complex XML based structured authoring, review, approval, and publishing workflows.
• Test automated workflows, including content creation, reuse, versioning, branching, localization, metadata management, and publication processes.
• Validate workflow orchestration across multiple integrated systems and services.
• Ensure content integrity throughout the content lifecycle.

XML and Publishing Validation

• Perform validation of XML-based content processing pipelines.
• Verify XML structures (e.g., DITA maps, topics, etc.), metadata, key references, conrefs, and content reuse mechanisms.
• Validate XML transformations and publishing workflows.
• Conduct output fidelity testing by validating that rendered outputs accurately reflect source XML structure, metadata, conditional processing rules, content reuse mechanisms, and publishing business rules.
• Verify content accuracy across PDF, HTML, WebHelp, and other publishing formats.
• Troubleshoot content rendering issues and identify root causes across transformation pipelines.

Data Layer Testing

• Test both relational and NoSQL data architectures.
• Validate data persistence, retrieval, indexing, and content storage processes.
• Perform scale and performance testing against our content databases .
• Develop and execute XQuery-based validation scripts to verify content integrity and business rules.
• Validate database indexing, search relevance, faceted search behavior, metadata retrieval, taxonomy relationships, and content discoverability across large repositories.
• Ensure data consistency across systems and environments.

API and Integration Testing

• Design and execute API testing for REST, GraphML, MCP and SOAP services.
• Validate API and Application integrations with authoring tools, publishing engines, translation management systems, identity providers, content delivery platforms, and downstream applications.
• Test webhook-based integrations and event-driven workflows.
• Verify message processing, asynchronous workflows, and system-to-system communication.
• Perform end-to-end validation across integrated platforms.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and fault tolerance of integration points.

Performance and Reliability Testing

• Validate system performance under realistic content processing workloads.
• Test scalability of publishing pipelines and content repositories.
• Identify bottlenecks across application, database, and integration layers.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve system reliability and performance.

Collaboration & Execution

• Partner closely with global developers, technical writers, product managers, and QA teams.
• Document results and issues in Jira with detailed repro steps, severity levels, and acceptance criteria.
• Support multiple projects simultaneously while maintaining sprint velocity and meeting deadlines.
• Contribute to cross-functional initiatives such as DevOps, release management, and quality governance.

Experience And Skills

Mandatory Requirements & Qualifications

• Excellent English language (written and spoken) skills.
• Strong experience with enterprise XML based Component Content Management Systems (CCMS), including structured content authoring, workflow management, content reuse, localization, and publishing processes.
• Solid understanding of XML content architectures and structured content management.
• Strong understanding of XML technologies and XML-based publishing pipelines.
• Experience validating publishing outputs against source XML content.
• Hands-on experience testing XML/NoSQL database platforms, with the ability to develop and execute XQuery-based validation scripts.
• Experience testing modern APIs.
• Experience testing asynchronous, event-driven, and webhook-based workflows.
• Strong SQL skills and experience validating relational database systems.
• Expertise in Playwright (JS/TS), JMeter, Azure DevOps, and Jira.
• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in SQA, specifically testing XML based systems. .
• Proven experience defining enterprise QA strategy, establishing testing standards, and driving quality initiatives across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to influence product, engineering, and architectural decisions through quality leadership.
• Experience mentoring QA engineers and leading quality efforts without direct supervision.
• Track record of improving release quality, automation maturity, and testing efficiency at an organizational level.
• Deep understanding of SDLC/STLC with proven Agile/Scrum experience.
• Strong skills in test data creation, maintenance, and management.
• Ability to manage multiple projects independently in a fast-paced environment.
• Education: MCA / Bachelor’s in Engineering (Computer Science or equivalent).
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Preferred Skills & Qualifications

• Experience with Power Automate for workflow automation.
• Strong API and database testing expertise (REST, SOAP, SQL, MarkLogic, NoSQL).
• Accessibility testing knowledge (WCAG & EAA compliance).
• Proficiency with Git and version control systems.
• Experience working with structured content publishing ecosystems, including localization, translation management, or content delivery platforms.
• Exposure to cloud-based testing environments (AWS/Azure).
• Familiarity with containerized environments (Docker/Kubernetes) for test execution.
• Knowledge of security testing fundamentals (OWASP).