Easy Apply
Easy Apply
Who You Are
You catch problems before they explode—testing edge cases and degraded paths others overlook, so production fire drills can be prevented. You care deeply about the tools you use and create, shaping the internal frameworks and pipelines your team depends on. Your work validates millions of real-time customer interactions every day, from web to telephony platforms, and you’re always growing through peer reviews, knowledge sharing, and mentoring. You thrive in flexible, human-centered environments where hybrid collaboration and sustainable engineering aren’t just buzzwords, but the way you work. If you love building robust, high-throughput test platforms as much as we do, we’d love to hear from you!
At Vail, our QA Engineering team is deeply technical — we don’t just validate features, we build the frameworks and infrastructure that test real-world signaling flows, analyze media quality, and run performance tests that mimic millions of live voice and web sessions. We're engineers at heart, with a QA-first mindset and a passion for building robust, scalable systems that reveal issues before our customers do.
What You'll Do
- Design Resilient Automation: Architect modular, data-driven test logic that adapts to fast-changing APIs and media flows—avoiding flakiness and minimizing brittleness across staging and production environments.
- Validate Telecom Systems: Build test harnesses to simulate and validate WebRTC, GRPC, SIP, RTP, and SDP flows, ensuring bidirectional audio, proper codec negotiation, and session integrity across signaling stacks.
- Debug Deeply: Triage complex failures across distributed systems using Wireshark, Kibana, synthetic probes, and layered log inspection. Be the engineer who thrives when pipelines hang without logs and staging diverges from prod.
- Own Performance Analysis: Create and tune load and stress test plans that model real customer usage. Analyze metrics like CPU, memory, latency, thread starvation, and media jitter—surfacing insights using Grafana, Thanos, and internal dashboards.
- Own CI/CD Resilience: Define Jenkins pipelines, containerized regression suites, and Kubernetes job specs that run autonomously and recover gracefully from flake or external service instability.
- Improve QA Strategy: Identify and work with the team on initiatives to identify blind spots in coverage, simulate degraded network conditions, and validate cross-system message flows, audio quality, and fallback behaviors.
- Mentor & Multiply Impact: Guide a team of QA engineers in debugging, automation design, and test strategy. Share knowledge on root-cause analysis, flaky test isolation, and test validation best practices.
- Push the Edge: Research new tooling and methods in VoIP quality scoring, call simulation, or protocol fuzzing. Elevate how we test and what we know.
Qualifications - We encourage you to apply if you think your experience may be a match, even if you do not meet all the qualifications.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Automation Fluency: 5+ years of experience writing resilient test code in Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, or C++. Understanding of abstraction, mocks, retries, dependency isolation, and test design trade-offs.
- Telecom Test Knowledge: Familiarity with SIP/SDP/RTP call setup, audio path validation.
- Media Quality Awareness: Experience interpreting voice quality metrics, using Wireshark RTP tools, or validating audio/video streams under load or packet loss.
- Performance Engineering: Ability to build load tests that reveal bottlenecks before customers do. Comfortable investigating jitter, latency spikes, heap exhaustion, and load-shedding scenarios.
- Debugging Mastery: Ability to diagnose issues with no stack trace, across systems you didn’t write, and validate real user complaints when staging is clean.
- CI/CD Tooling: Ability to build and maintain Jenkins pipelines, Docker-based workflows, and K8s test deployments. Familiarity with headless testing, log aggregation, and test orchestration at scale.
- Framework-Agnostic Engineering: Adapts seamlessly to different frameworks—whether Cucumber, Selenium, or a custom stack—tailoring approaches to fit internal tools and bespoke platforms.
- DevOps Fluency: Skilled with Jenkins (or another CI server), Docker, Kubernetes (jobs, Helm charts), and Unix/Linux shell scripting.
- Data & Databases: Experience querying and managing SQL Server (or other RDBMS), MongoDB for test data setup and result analysis.
- Process & Practices: Passionate about Agile, TDD/BDD/ATDD workflows, code reviews, and collaborative design.
- Interpersonal Skills: Communicates clearly, takes initiative without perfect specs, collaborates across functions, and believes QA should be integrated early and often.
Who We Are
At Vail, we believe in the unique power of voice interactions to create more expressive, more intimate, and more efficient interpersonal interactions. Using Vail technology, we make millions of voice interactions better every day. We process around 10% of all toll-free call traffic in the U.S.; 1 in 10 times when someone calls a customer support hotline, Vail is routing or interacting with that call.
We are rapidly growing across multiple dimensions, including our customer base, the scope of products we offer, and the size of our team. Now is the right time for a strong candidate to join and grow with us. We have a supportive culture where employees are encouraged to achieve both personal and team goals because we believe growth leads to both business impact and personal fulfillment.
We offer competitive compensation and affordable benefits with flexibility and choice to meet individual and family (including Domestic Partnerships) needs, including:
· Multiple medical, dental, and vision plan options
· Company-paid life insurance, short and long-term disability
· 401(k) savings plan with company match (50% on first 6% of employee contribution)
· 35 days total annual PTO
· Annual Bonus Program
· Paid maternity and paternity leave
· Relocation allowance
· Employee referral bonus
· Gym membership
· Technical and Professional Development stipend
We are striving to implement and sustain an inclusive and equitable work environment for all employees by sourcing underrepresented groups and continually empowering those individuals within our organization to further enrich Vail’s communication solutions. We recognize that equitable and unique individuals benefit our teams’ problem-solving, innovation, and development efforts.
Our offices are located in Deerfield and Chicago, IL. Interviews and onboarding are conducted in our offices when possible. We observe a hybrid work format that provides employees flexibility to collaborate with team members based on business needs.
Vail Systems, Inc. Chicago, Illinois, USA Office
Vail Systems, Inc. Chicago Loop Office Office
Our Chicago Loop office is located alongside the Chicago River at 2 N Riverside Plaza, with access to nearby CTA/Metra stations, street or garage parking, and free on-site indoor bicycle parking. Our Deerfield office is located right next to the Lake Cook Road Metra station at 570 Lake Cook Road.
Vail Systems, Inc. Deerfield, Illinois, USA Office
Vail Systems, Inc. Deerfield Office Office
570 Lake Cook Road, Deerfield, IL, United States, 60015
What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene
With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.
Key Facts About Chicago Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
- Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
- Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
