Automation Test Engineer

**Automation Tester** Improvix Technologies \| Federal Program \| Washington, DC**Compensation:** **$140,000 – $150,000****Location:** Washington, DC (Foggy Bottom) — hybrid, 3 days onsite / 2 days remote**Clearance:** Active Secret clearance required.**Employment Type:** Full\-Time**THE REGRESSION SUITE IS THE JOB, NOT THE SIDE PROJECT** On most programs, automation is what somebody promises to get to after the release. The suite goes stale, half the scripts fail for reasons nobody investigates, and the team quietly goes back to running the same 200 manual cases every sprint. Improvix Technologies is hiring an Automation Tester for an active federal program in Washington, DC. You'll build and maintain Automation Framework tools and scripts that covers regression, run it in the CI pipeline, and validate what the application writes to the database — not just what it renders on the screen. This is hands\-on testing work with real ownership. You'll write the scripts, read the failures, decide whether it's a defect or a flaky locator, and be the person who can say with confidence whether a build is safe to ship.**WHY TESTERS TAKE THIS ROLE*** **Automation is funded here.** Framework maintenance, new coverage, and CI integration are the role — not overtime work squeezed around a manual test queue. * **You own the framework, not a folder of scripts.** Page Object Model, data\-driven and BDD structure, the CI/CD jobs that run it. If something about the design is wrong, you're the one who fixes it. * **A clearance that follows you.** Active Secret required for this seat — cleared QA automation experience is a durable, portable credential in this market. * **Real hybrid, stated plainly.** Three days onsite at Foggy Bottom, two remote. It's a fixed schedule, not a moving target. * **Room above you.** The program runs QA leads and senior automation engineers. There's a next step from this role, and people who've taken it. **WHAT YOU'LL OWN****Test Automation*** Design, build, and maintain automated test scripts using Automation frameworks like Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Junit, NUnit etc. * Extend and maintain the automation framework — Page Object Model, data\-driven, modular, and BDD structure using Cucumber and Gherkin. * Integrate automated suites into the CI/CD pipeline with Gitlab or similar CI/CD tools, so regression runs on every build, not on request. * Triage failures: separate real defects from environment issues and brittle locators, and fix the scripts that are lying to you. * Execute cross\-browser and cross\-platform runs and keep coverage current as the application changes. **Test Design \& Execution*** Review user stories, acceptance criteria, and business rules to build test scenarios and cases with clear traceability to requirements. * Execute functional, smoke, integration, system, and regression testing across sprint and release cycles. * Support User Acceptance Testing — preparing scripts, walking business users through them, and ca