Senior WebRTC QA & Automation Engineer

Role overview:

You’ll be a founding member of Gather’s QA team, driving a new approach to quality within the Gather product through manual and automated video and application performance testing. We need someone who can carry the “Extreme Quality” banner while helping our development team move quickly. We deploy multiple times a day, and that should get faster.

WebRTC lies at the heart of the Gather experience, providing a low-latency, seamless experience for the spontaneous interactions we're known for. You will explore every nook and cranny of our video system, ensuring it behaves as expected across OS platforms and under a multitude of network conditions and hardware configurations.

Gather does more than your average video conferencing platform — we provide an entire virtual office. That means our application’s performance requires a watchful eye and a steady hand. You will ensure that performance never regresses unnoticed through persistent testing and by building automated test suites that recreate real-world situations.

Where you will make an impact:

• Build automated test bots with Selenium and Playwright to push our video system to its limits—scaling up participant counts to test the boundaries of what our video calls can handle under real-world conditions.
• You’ll shape the tools and approach to testing within Gather, establishing patterns for years to come.
• Write and oversee the operation of test scripts that ensure our video system gracefully handles adverse network conditions and resource-constrained computers.
• Collaborate closely with the video team to harden our video infrastructure, ensuring that SFUs, TURN servers, and clients all play nicely under pressure.
• Hunt down edge-case bugs by executing manual test plans across new and existing features, catching them before they sneak into production.
• Deliver insights from your tests that shape the future of our product—helping us create the most resilient video platform possible.

What you bring:

• A deep understanding of video technologies, with bonus points, if you’ve wrestled with WebRTC’s quirks—buffer bloat and packet loss are your adversaries, and you have the skills to find and identify them.
• An ability to confidently self-direct — you must craft test plans and automated tests and choose which are most valuable to prioritize in the future.
• Expertise in Selenium and Playwright, with a proven track record of crafting robust test scripts for complex applications.
• Practical knowledge of Windows and Mac, their audio/video subsystems, and the ability to figure out why they break.
• Familiarity with TypeScript, Javascript, and writing automation for React-based applications.
• A willingness and desire to get your hands dirty in manual testing, doing whatever it takes to ensure we ship excellent software. You’ll be establishing new testing procedures from scratch.
• A passion for chasing the best possible video quality, diving into WebRTC internals, and using metrics like VMAF to ensure an image is sharp enough to cut somebody.
• Exceptional communication skills—you’ll keep engineers, product managers, and our support team in the loop with concise, actionable insights, ensuring no bugs sneak past your watch.

US Salary Range

At Gather, compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $130,000 - $185,000 annually and we encourage candidates outside of this salary range to apply.

Base pay is one part of the total package provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role will be eligible for a stock reward that's reflective of an early-stage startup.