Senior Software Test Engineer

Overview:

About Certara

Certara accelerates the potential of bringing medicines to market and to patients using biosimulation software, technology, and services to transform traditional drug discovery and development. Our clients include more than 2,400 biopharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and regulatory agencies across 70 countries.

Our goal is to enable the life sciences industry’s use of data, modeling, and analytics to make better decisions across the various phases of discovery and drug development. Our software and scientists incorporate modern advances in scientific understanding, drug development experience, data analysis, and AI resulting in significant opportunities to decrease the cost and increase the probability of success for new drug approval and commercialization.

Overview

As a Senior Software Test Engineer on Phoenix Cloud, you'll combine Playwright test automation with hands-on functional testing to build and evolve automated regression and traceability that supports installation qualification (IQ) and operational qualification (OQ) for regulated cloud modules. Phoenix Desktop is the industry's gold standard for pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) noncompartmental analysis (NCA), trusted by the FDA, academic researchers, and leading biopharmaceutical companies for more than 30 years. With Phoenix Cloud, we are reimagining the full workflow from “data in” to “report out” in the cloud. Your work relieves customer validation concerns and helps research teams move faster without lowering the accuracy bar life-sciences customers require.

You'll join a product-aligned group within Phoenix Cloud working across a growing suite of cloud-native modules (from publication-ready visualisations to GenAI-powered report authoring and more on the horizon). You'll partner with software engineers, product managers, and testers who share ownership of quality across the platform.

About the team

Phoenix Cloud is built by a collaborative organization of engineers, testers, product managers, subject matter experts (SMEs), and customer-facing teams, organized into product-aligned groups across a growing multi-module platform. Regression coverage is evolving module by module, and pipeline reliability is a near-term focus alongside expanding automation. Teams work in an agile, cross-functional model with a high bar for accuracy, performance, test coverage, and maintainability. Software ships under validation standards expected by regulated life-sciences customers. Technical decisions are made by the people closest to the work. You'll report to an engineering manager and work as a senior individual contributor: hands-on automation first, with informal coaching, not people management. In this role, most of your time is hands-on automation and pipeline quality work, with meaningful cross-functional collaboration across product, engineering, and support, including qualifying support-originated defects.

Responsibilities:

Most of your time is hands-on Playwright automation and pipeline reliability. Your priority outcomes:

• Design, build, and maintain Playwright automated tests and frameworks that expand regression coverage across Phoenix Cloud modules
• Shape automated regression and IQ/OQ documentation (largely automated via XRAY) so regulated releases have traceable coverage customers and auditors can follow
• Keep automated test pipelines reliable: investigate failing tests, reduce flakiness, and improve feedback time for the team

You'll also:

• Perform functional and exploratory testing on new and changing features, and use what you learn to expand automated coverage
• Partner with product and engineering on requirements so new features are testable before they are built
• Triage and qualify defects across the stack, including support-originated issues, using local builds, application databases, and SQL where needed
• Partner with engineering on testability; occasionally contribute tests where gaps block automated regression
• Informally coach testers and engineers on automation practices, test design, and quality standards
• Develop a working understanding of PK/PD workflows and the regulatory context our customers operate in (no prior pharmaceutical experience required)

Qualifications:

Required

• 4+ years of professional experience in software test engineering or test automation, where you've owned test automation strategy and maintainable suites (not just individual test cases) in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment for a shipped product
• Experience building and maintaining automated test suites in a CI/CD environment using modern browser automation; Playwright is our team stack (experience with Cypress, Selenium, or similar tools transfers well)
• Experience working in a collaborative agile organization with cross-functional teams (engineering, product, quality assurance (QA))
• Ability to triage automated test failures using application logs, application programming interfaces (APIs), and relational databases where relevant
• Demonstrated partnership with engineering on testability, defect triage, and release quality

You might be a fit if

• You've scoped what must be automated vs. exercised manually for a regulated release, and can defend that mix to engineering and product under time and cost constraints
• You've shipped validation evidence (IQ/OQ or equivalent) where auditors care about traceability, not just green CI
• You push back on vague acceptance criteria before writing tests, and you've improved how a team tests as a result

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated or validated software environments (Good Practice (GxP) regulations, 21 CFR Part 11, or similar), or direct experience with customer validation packages
• Experience with performance or load testing and large test data generation
• Familiarity with IQ/OQ documentation packages in life sciences, or test management tools such as XRAY
• Experience with AWS or infrastructure-as-code for test environments
• PK/PD, pharmacometrics, or life-sciences domain background
• Experience informally coaching junior or mid-level testers

Certara bases all employment-related decision on merit, taking into consideration qualifications, skills, achievement, and performance. We treat all applicants and employees without regard to personal characteristics such as race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, nationality, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental condition, genetic information, military service, or other characteristic protected by law.