Software Test Engineer

The Opportunity

Cala is seeking a Software Test Engineer to join our digital team. As a key part of the broader Quality Assurance (QA) ecosystem, the Software Test Engineer collaborates closely with Quality, Engineering, and Product to drive test strategies and mitigate risks early. You will be the quality gate for our mobile apps, web platform, and APIs. The work is a deliberate mix: manual and exploratory testing to hunt for the problems an automated check would never think to look for, and automation to prove that what worked last release still works today. You will sit alongside our Full Stack Software Engineers, testing features as they are built and taking defects through to verified fixes. Because our software is used in a regulated healthcare setting, how carefully you document what you tested matters as much as what you found.

Title: Software Test Engineer
Reports to: Staff DevOps Engineer
Location: Remote, Hybrid if local to our San Mateo, CA headquarters
Employment type: Full-Time, Exempt
Pay range: $120,000 - $135,000

**Final compensation is based on experience, skills, market benchmarks, and internal equity, with potential adjustments for candidate location.**

Specific Responsibilities

• Manual and Exploratory Testing: Perform functional, exploratory, sanity, and end-to-end testing across mobile and web applications, including device and OS compatibility testing on physical devices, emulators, and simulators.
• Test Automation: Design, build, and maintain automated test scripts for mobile and web applications and help grow automated regression suites
• API Testing: Validate REST API behavior directly — request and response contracts, status codes, authentication, error handling, and edge cases — independently of the user interface.
• Test Design and Traceability: Write test cases from requirements, user stories, and design specifications, and maintain traceability between requirements, acceptance criteria, and test results.
• AI-Assisted Testing: Use AI tools to accelerate quality work — generating and reviewing test cases, drafting and refactoring automation scripts, and triaging logs and failures — and help test the AI-powered features in our products, including their non-deterministic behavior.
• Defect Management: Identify, log, and track software defects with clear step-by-step reproduction steps, device logs (Xcode/Android Studio)
• Release Support: Support release readiness through regression execution, results analysis, and clear reporting on what was tested and what remains at risk.
• Collaboration: Partner with Quality, Engineering and Product to clarify expected behavior early and surface quality risks well before release.
  

Required Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 1 to 3 years of hands-on software testing experience spanning both manual testing and automation.
• Demonstrated manual testing competency: writing structured test cases, executing end-to-end test suites, and capturing precise technical reproduction details.
• Hands-on experience building web and mobile automation frameworks, specifically using Playwright with JavaScript for web testing and Appium with Java/Python for mobile app testing.
• Experience testing REST APIs using tools such as Postman.
• Practical use of AI tools in day-to-day engineering work — for test case generation, script authoring, log analysis, or debugging — with good judgment about where AI output needs verification.
• Comfort with mobile platform tooling: installing builds on devices, collecting device logs, and managing emulators and simulators for iOS and Android.
• Working knowledge of version control and running tests within CI/CD pipelines.
• Clear written communication — your defect reports and test documentation are read by engineers, product managers, and quality reviewers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) or other regulated software environments, including design controls and applicable quality system standards (e.g., ISO 13485, IEC 62304).
• Experience maintaining a Requirements Traceability Matrix or equivalent traceability documentation.
• Experience testing on real-device cloud platforms – BrowserStack.
• Familiarity with performance, accessibility, or security testing fundamentals.
• Basic scripting or tooling work to make testing faster for the whole team.

Physical Demands

• Ability to sit or stand at a desk for prolonged periods of time
• Ability to operate a computer keyboard, mouse, mobile devices, and other related equipment
• Close vision, color vision, and the ability to adjust focus are required to read code, analyze interfaces, and visually identify defects