Staff Software Engineer in Test (Modeling and Simulation)
Founding Staff SDET on Code Metal's Modeling & Simulation team, designing and building the automated validation architecture for a wargaming and decision-support platform serving the U.S. DoW. Hands-on Python/pytest test infrastructure, CI reliability, and testing of distributed, stateful, and AI-assisted simulation workflows.
- Compensation
- $145K–$185K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco Hub
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Significant experience as an SDET, test-infrastructure engineer, quality architect, or software engineer responsible for automated validation of production systems
- Strong production programming skills in Python
- Deep experience building Python test infrastructure using pytest or comparable frameworks, including asynchronous testing, fixtures and factories, parallel execution, and CI integration
- Experience designing risk-based test strategies across multiple layers of a distributed system
- Experience validating complex systems with partially nondeterministic behavior such as simulation, statistical models, ML, or AI-assisted workflows
- Hands-on experience testing Docker-based or comparable containerized multi-service applications, including APIs, databases, messaging, auth, and data isolation
- Experience building and improving CI workflows with GitHub Actions or a comparable platform, including test isolation and flaky-test control
- Ability to set technical direction, write design documents, mentor engineers, and lead multi-team initiatives through influence
- Typically 8+ years of relevant software engineering, test infrastructure, or quality engineering experience with Staff-level scope
Nice to have
- Experience validating simulation, geospatial, event-driven, or other stateful systems
- Familiarity with testing or debugging C++ simulation or systems code
- Experience testing TypeScript and React applications with Playwright or equivalent tools
- Experience with performance testing, generated test data, and API or schema validation
- Experience testing cloud-based, containerized systems using logs, metrics, traces, and retained test artifacts
- Familiarity with constructive simulation, distributed simulation standards, or mission-analysis software
- Hands-on experience evaluating AI-assisted or agentic systems, including tool-calling or multi-step workflows
- Experience using AI coding assistants or agents throughout the SDLC and defining quality controls for AI-assisted changes
- Experience in a regulated, high-assurance, or mission-critical domain
- Eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance
Full description
About Code Metal
Code Metal is the leader in automated software engineering you can trust. As AI writes more of the world's code, the bottleneck in software has shifted from writing code to verifying it works, and AI cannot verify its own work with certainty. Code Metal takes a fundamentally different approach: constrain AI to what it does reliably, verify every step independently of the model using formal methods, and keep engineers in the loop on the decisions that matter. The result isn't code that probably works — it's code that is provably correct, with auditable proof. Customers including the U.S. Air Force, L3Harris, RTX, and Toshiba use Code Metal to modernize legacy code, optimize performance on real hardware, and move prototypes to production, fast. Founded in 2023 with offices in Boston and San Francisco, Code Metal isfunded byAccel, Salesforce Ventures, B Capital, Smith Point Capital, J2 Ventures, Shield Capital, Overmatch, RTX, and others.
Learn more at .
About the Role
Code Metal is strengthening its Quality Engineering capabilities to make software quality more measurable, repeatable, and actionable. We are seeking a founding Staff Quality Engineer (SDET) for Modeling & Simulation, within the centralized Quality Engineering function.
Our Modeling & Simulation team builds wargaming and decision-support platform that helps the U.S. Department of War (DoW) evaluate mission- and campaign-level force-design decisions. The system combines backend APIs, asynchronous workers, geospatial and sensing models, authenticated multi-team play (including fog of war), external simulation integrations, and emerging AI-assisted capabilities.
The platform already has automated unit and integration coverage, but its growing combination of distributed services, stateful simulation, external integrations, probabilistic behavior, and high-consequence user workflows requires a more systematic validation architecture. This role will connect and extend that foundation into reproducible quality evidence across services, models, and end-to-end workflows.
You will design and build the platform’s automated validation system, defining which behaviors require deterministic verification, statistical or model-based evaluation, or human review, and how limitations and residual risk are communicated as release evidence. This is a hands-on software engineering role: you will build foundational test infrastructure, write critical tests, and help engineers build quality into their work.
Core Responsibilities
- Translate Quality Engineering strategy into a risk-based validation approach for Modeling & Simulation across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, performance, resilience, and security-critical workflows.
- Build reliable test infrastructure, including deterministic fixtures, isolated test data, service and event-contract tests, integration harnesses, versioned reference scenarios, deterministic replay, and focused browser automation for critical user journeys.