QA and Test Engineer

AST SpaceMobile is building the first and only global cellular broadband network in space to operate directly with standard, unmodified mobile devices based on our extensive IP and patent portfolio and designed for both commercial and government applications. Our engineers and space scientists are on a mission to eliminate the connectivity gaps faced by today’s five billion mobile subscribers and finally bring broadband to the billions who remain unconnected.

Position Overview

We are seeking a QA & Test Engineer to own product validation, verification, and quality engineering for all software delivered by our internal development teams. You will define and execute test strategies, design and build test cases and automated regression suites, manage test environments, track and drive defect resolution, and serve as the team’s formal authority on what has been proven to work before software ships. The right candidate brings solid software testing experience — ideally in a telecom, protocol stack, or network software context — combined with the technical depth to derive meaningful test cases from protocol specifications, ICDs, and architectural design documents.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define, own, and maintain the overall test strategy for the internal software products
• Produce test plans for each major release and milestone, specifying scope, approach, entry and exit criteria, test types (functional, integration, regression, performance, end-to-end), and risk areas
• Execute manual and automated test cycles, document results rigorously, and provide clear pass/fail reports with supporting evidence
• Design and execute negative testing, boundary condition testing, protocol edge-case scenarios, and fault injection tests to validate system resilience, error handling, and graceful degradation across all product areas
• Develop and maintain the test tooling, test environments and simulation infrastructure needed to execute tests
• Integrate automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines and monitor test results, coverage trends, and flakiness over time, driving continuous improvement in automation reliability
• Maintain a living test documentation library: test plans, test cases, execution results, and release readiness assessments, kept current as software evolves across sprints and milestones
• Support post-deployment validation and smoke testing to confirm that released software operates correctly in production and staging network environments

Qualifications

Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent professional experience.

Experience & Qualifications:

• A minimum of 4+ years of professional experience in software quality assurance and test engineering, with demonstrated experience testing complex, integration-heavy software systems.
• Experience testing telecom software, protocol stack implementations, or network elements is a plus.
• Proven ability to define test strategies, write detailed test plans, and design test cases from functional specifications, architectural design documents, and interface control documents (ICDs)
• Experience testing software against defined interface specifications or protocol standards; able to derive test cases from low-level technical documents such as ICDs, state machine diagrams, or 3GPP-style specifications
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining automated test suites using Python-based frameworks (pytest, Robot Framework, or equivalent); able to write clean, maintainable test automation code
• Experience designing and managing test environments, including stubs, mock services, and simulators, for testing networked software in isolation from live dependencies
• Disciplined approach to defect logging, triage, tracking, and verification using standard issue-tracking tools (Jira or equivalent)
• Experience in integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and maintaining quality gates (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent)
• Comfortable executing tests, debugging issues, and managing test tooling in Linux/Unix environments; familiarity with command-line debugging and log analysis
• Ability to read C or Go source code to understand component behavior when documentation is incomplete or ambiguous
• Experience designing and executing performance, load, or stress tests for high-throughput or low-latency networked software components (e.g. using Locust, k6, iPerf, or custom tooling)
• Experience with dedicated test case management platforms (TestRail, Xray for Jira, Zephyr, or equivalent)
• English proficiency at B2 level or above

Soft Skills:

• Strong problem-solving mindset with a bias toward automation and operational efficiency
• Collaborative and communicative — comfortable working in a globally distributed team
• Ownership mentality - take responsibility for end-to-end reliability of systems under your care
• Adaptable and self-directed, with the ability to manage competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
• Meticulous attention to detail in documentation, change management, and operational procedures

Technology Stack:

• Python (pytest, Robot Framework, or equivalent), C, Go and Rust
• gRPC, REST API testing tools (Postman, requests library
• iPerf, Locust, k6, or custom tooling for throughput and latency validation
• GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, ArgoCD
• Docker, K8s (test environment provisioning and management)
• Prometheus, Grafana, structured log analysis (ELK stack or equivalent) for diagnosing test failures in deployed environments
• Git (GitHub / GitLab)
• Confluence, test case management tools (e.g. TestRail, Xray, or equivalent)

Physical Requirements

• Ability to work in a standard office or remote home-office environment and use a computer for extended periods
• Ability to participate in occasional after-hours incident response actions

This job description may not be inclusive to the duties and responsibilities listed. Additional tasks may be assigned to the employee from time to time or the scope of the job may change as needed by business demands .

AST SpaceMobile is an Equal Opportunity, at will Employer; employment is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.