Senior SDET — Build & Hand Off UI Test Automation for Plotly Dash Apps (Playwright, Fixed-Term)

Title: Senior SDET — Build & Hand Off UI Test Automation for Plotly Dash Apps (Playwright, Fixed-Term) Category: Development & IT → QA & Testing Project type: Fixed-price (preferred) Duration: 4–6 weeks, starting June 2026 Experience level: Expert THE ENGAGEMENT We're a small, fast-moving development team looking for a senior SDET to lay the rails for UI testing on our Plotly Dash analytics applications — and then hand us the keys. This is a build-and-handoff engagement, not a permanent seat and not a backlog of feature tests to grind through. You'll design and build the automation harness, wire a basic CI hook so it runs on every pull request, and document everything well enough that our standing team (and the AI coding agents that assist them) can run and extend it without you. The framework choices made now will shape how we test these applications for years. We're hiring you in part to help us decide what that foundation should look like — bring an opinion on tooling, defend it, and put the rails down cleanly. WHAT YOU'LL DELIVER Base scope (required): 1. UI/E2E automation harness for our Plotly Dash apps — Playwright is our working preference, but we want your opinion. The harness must handle dynamic, callback-driven dashboard behavior and be designed so others can extend it without re-architecting. 2. Basic CI hook — a GitHub Actions workflow that runs the harness on every pull request. Simple trigger, not a full quality-gating system. 3. Handoff package — documentation (runbooks, conventions, framework rationale) plus a training/walkthrough session so our team can own everything after you leave. Additional scope (optional, if base completes ahead of schedule / budget allows): 1. A reusable test/UAT environment with its own data store, isolated from production (IaC preferred). 2. Lightweight test telemetry — run duration, pass/fail rates, flake tracking. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Strong Python. - Demonstrable experience building UI automation harnesses for dynamic single-page or dashboard applications — the harness itself, not test cases inside someone else's harness. Playwright or a similar modern framework (Selenium, Cypress, WebdriverIO). - A clear point of view on what makes a framework maintainable: avoiding tight coupling to selectors and tool internals, keeping tests stable as the UI evolves, keeping the harness usable by people other than its author. - Hands-on experience wiring CI for automated tests (GitHub Actions; Azure DevOps Pipelines a plus). - Comfort working alongside AI coding tools — they'll be helping with the work, and the harness you build is part of how we trust their output. - A bias toward shipping something the team can own. Your success is measured by what we can run without you. Bonus points: - Direct experience testing Plotly Dash applications. - Standing up isolated test/UAT environments (containerized or VM-based). - Tolerance-based assertions or golden-dataset techniques for analytics correctness. - Automated testing frameworks in an agentic SDLC environment. WHAT'S EXPLICITLY OUT OF SCOPE To set expectations clearly up front: ongoing authoring of feature tests (our developers and AI agents write tests into your harness), unit/integration/contract test architecture, long-term operation or on-call, and product feature work. If you're looking for an ongoing QA seat, this isn't that engagement — but if you nail this, we'd love to bring you back when the testing infrastructure needs to evolve.