Software Development Engineer in Test
Alpen Labs develops Alpen, an EVM-compatible Bitcoin validity rollup and testnet for building Bitcoin-native financial applications. The platform enables developers to deploy smart contracts and build applications involving BTC lending, payments, vaults, and other programmable financial use cases.
Maintainer signals as of 8/10/2026
Funding history
About Alpen Labs
Alpen Labs operates and develops Alpen, a work-in-progress EVM-compatible validity rollup on Bitcoin. Alpen uses Bitcoin for consensus and data availability and provides a testnet, block and checkpoint explorers, developer documentation, RPC access, smart-contract deployment guidance, and node-operation materials. Its platform targets developers and teams building Bitcoin-native financial applications, with support for EVM tooling, account abstraction, BTC bridging, and programmable BTC transactions.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will act as the quality gate between engineering and production, ensuring releases are ready for users. You will build and maintain automation frameworks and regression suites for backend services, APIs, and blockchain infrastructure. You will design test strategies based on product requirements and user journeys, validate upgrades and migrations, and integrate testing into CI/CD pipelines. You will perform exploratory testing, investigate failures and defects, assess release risks, document test plans and standards, review code for testability, and use AI-assisted development tools to improve coverage and QA workflows.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience as an SDET, QA Automation Engineer, or similar software quality engineering role.
- Experience building automated testing frameworks for large-scale production systems.
- Experience testing production software in Web3, blockchain, fintech, or other high-reliability distributed systems.
- Experience with backend, API, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Proficiency with Python for automation and API testing.
- Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud-native environments.
- Ability to read and understand Rust code.
- Familiarity with EVM-based systems.
- Understanding of regression testing, release management, and risk-based testing methodologies.
- Experience collaborating with engineering and product teams throughout the software development lifecycle.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools is strongly preferred.
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain scalable automation frameworks for backend services, APIs, and blockchain infrastructure.
- Design test strategies based on product requirements, user journeys, and usage scenarios.
- Build and maintain automated regression test suites.
- Validate software upgrades and version migrations.
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and improve execution speed, reliability, and coverage.
- Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate test creation and improve QA workflows.
- Define acceptance criteria and identify quality risks with engineering and product teams.
- Execute exploratory testing to identify edge cases and usability issues.
- Assess defects and release risks and determine whether issues block production releases.
- Troubleshoot failures, reproduce bugs, and report findings to engineering teams.
- Review code and improve testability, maintainability, and reliability.
- Create and maintain technical documentation, test plans, testing standards, and release checklists.
- Improve QA processes and tooling.