Quality Engineer (SDET)
Prudentia Sciences · San Francisco · hybrid
USD 120,000 to 145,000 per year
ABOUT PRUDENTIA SCIENCES
Prudentia Sciences is an AI-powered technology platform transforming how biopharma, biotech, and life sciences investors approach portfolio management, due diligence, and value/risk simulation. Our platform accelerates investment in breakthrough therapies by:
- Empowering biopharma to accelerate drug pipelines, maximize ROI, and achieve clinical and commercial success for greater patient impact
- Enabling strategic positioning of asset value during portfolio planning and dealmaking
- Equipping investors with data-driven insights to optimize capital allocation in drug asset transactions
Backed by GV (Google Ventures), McKesson, Signal Fire, Iaso Ventures, and Virtue, we're on a mission to unlock the full potential of pharmaceutical R&D by empowering decision-makers with real-time, data-driven insights.
WE’RE HIRING OUR FIRST DEDICATED QA ENGINEER: A HANDS-ON ENGINEER WHO WRITES CODE, BUILDS QUALITY INTO OUR PLATFORM FROM THE GROUND UP, AND CARES AS MUCH ABOUT PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY AS ABOUT CORRECTNESS.
This is a rare opportunity to join a high-impact technology company in a major growth stage, where you’ll partner closely with engineering, product, and ML teams to safeguard the trust our pharma and biopharma customers place in our platform. Our platform is quickly seeing exceptional demand in its sector, and is backed by top-tier life science investors who have an informed perspective on where AI can have a profound impact in the industry.
What You’ll Do
- Test Automation: Design, build, and maintain automated test suites across UI, API, and data pipelines, with most coverage at the API and data layers, so the team can ship fast and with confidence as the platform scales.
- AI-Assisted Engineering: Use AI coding tools (like Claude Code) daily to build and maintain tests, and know when to question their output. You understand why the code works, not just that it runs, and you keep sensitive data out of AI tools.
- Quality Gates in CI/CD: Own the automated quality gates in our CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions), deciding what blocks a release and what doesn’t. Be ruthless about eliminating flaky or long-running tests.
- API & Contract Testing: Test at the API layer by default, and catch breaking changes between services before they reach production.
- Performance & Reliability Testing: Own load, performance, and reliability testing so the platform meets the availability and responsiveness expectations of deal teams working with large volumes of sensitive, time-sensitive data.
- Bug Tracking & Triage: Identify, document, and triage defects with clear reproduction steps, work with engineers to prioritize fixes, and make clear go/no-go release calls.
- Data & Output Validation: Validate the accuracy and consistency of ML-driven outputs (risk analyses, valuations, scientific assessments) as they move from the orchestration layer into user-facing views.
- Security & Compliance Awareness: Help verify secure handling of sensitive scientific and deal data, including keeping each customer’s data separate, in line with best practices for healthcare and life sciences data.
- Collaboration & Process: Work cross-functionally with engineers, product leads, and domain experts to translate scientific and business requirements into clear, testable acceptance criteria.
- Continuous Improvement: Champion a quality-first culture: advocate for testability in design reviews, improve test coverage over time, and stay current on modern QA tooling and practices.
Who You Are
Core Qualifications
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
- QA Experience: Proven experience testing modern web applications and designing and building automated test suites, ideally as the person who owned them.
- Test Automation Tools: Hands-on experience with automated testing frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Cypress) and API testing tools (e.g., pytest, REST-assured, pactflow).
- CI/CD Integration: Experience owning automated tests in CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions), including setting up quality gates and managing flaky tests.
- AI-Assisted Development: Hands-on use of AI coding tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) in your daily work, with a habit of verifying what they produce.
- Performance Testing: Experience designing load or performance tests and finding real bottlenecks.
- Technical Fluency: Comfort reading code and working directly with engineers to understand system architecture, APIs, and data flows well enough to design meaningful tests.
- Data-Driven Applications: Experience testing applications with complex, data-driven workflows.
- Bug Tracking & Communication: Skilled at writing clear, reproducible bug reports and explaining quality risks and release readiness to the team.
- Security & Compliance Awareness: Familiarity with best practices for secure data handling and testing in regulated or sensitive-data environments (especially valuable in healthcare, life sciences, or enterprise environments).
- Collaboration & Product Mindset: Strong communication and collaboration skills; ability to work closely with engineers, product managers, and scientific domain experts to deliver a high-quality user experience.
Bonus
- Experience in healthcare, life sciences, or biopharma sectors is nice, but not required. More important is a willingness to dive into the field and a curiosity to learn about life sciences and the drug development process, and how deal making revolves around it.
WHAT WE OFFER
- Impact: Your work directly enables breakthrough therapies to reach patients faster
- Ownership: Build and lead the platform as a foundational engineering leader
- Growth: Shape our product experience during a critical scaling phase
- Compensation: Competitive salary and equity
- Team: Collaborative, mission-driven colleagues passionate about transforming biopharma
LOCATION
This role is hybrid, requiring being onsite 2 days per week (Tuesday/Thursday) in one of our U.S. hubs: Boston, New York City, or San Francisco.