Resume.pdf
PAULINE MCHUGH
Senior QA Automation Engineer | SDET
Houston, TX  ·  mchughpf@gmail.com  ·  linkedin.com/in/pfmchugh

Professional Summary

Senior QA Automation Engineer and SDET with 15+ years of experience building test automation, CI/CD pipelines, and quality programs across SaaS and financial services technology. Hands-on across UI, API, and performance testing, with a track record of embedding into engineering teams to upskill QA and engineers, establish best practices, and modernize testing with AI-augmented workflows. Comfortable across varied stacks—microservices, legacy systems, and AWS cloud. Certified Scrum Master.

Technical Skills

Test Automation: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Nightwatch.js, Browserstack, XCUITest
API & Performance: Postman, Mocha, Supertest, k6, jMeter, Locust
Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, SQL
Cloud & CI/CD: AWS (Lambda, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, GovCloud, CodeBuild), Jenkins, TeamCity, Git
Tooling & Environments: JIRA / JQL, Bash, PowerShell, Linux, macOS, Windows
AI in QA: Prompt engineering for test artifact generation; LLM-assisted failure triage and pattern recognition; AI-augmented script authoring and code review; evaluating AI tool fit and integrating AI workflows into existing QA processes (model-agnostic — applied across multiple LLM and coding-assistant tools).

Selected Recent Projects

  • Test data generation for tax and financial scenarios: Built Faker.js-based generators for realistic tax and financial test data and used AI-assisted scripting to accelerate generator development.
  • Automation failure analysis: Automated triage of test failures using LLM-assisted pattern recognition, cutting time spent investigating noisy or duplicate failures.
  • QA reporting dashboards: Designed and automated dashboards for the QA Manager surfacing test run health, coverage, and trends—turning manual status reporting into a self-service view.
  • Internal AI-in-QA enablement: Authored and delivered an internal presentation on practical AI applications across the QA lifecycle to drive adoption beyond my own team; provide ongoing 1:1 mentorship to peers on automation patterns and code review.

Professional Experience

Senior Software Development Engineer in TestMar 2021 – Present
SmartVault — Houston, TX (Remote)
Own automation strategy and execution across UI, API, and performance testing for a SaaS document management platform serving accounting and financial services firms.
  • Designed and scaled an automation suite of 500+ UI and API tests; continuously expanded coverage as new microservices and features shipped.
  • Architected AWS CodeBuild pipelines for daily test execution and reporting, integrating results into developer and QA workflows.
  • Built an automated Build Verification Test (BVT) suite for production deployments, reducing manual smoke testing during rollouts and de-risking releases.
  • Stood up a performance testing suite (k6) to validate scalability and support DevOps capacity planning.
  • Authored API documentation supporting third-party integration partners.
  • Drive adoption of AI-augmented QA practices across the team and mentor peers on automation patterns, code review, and testing fundamentals.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, product, and DevOps to assess automation readiness and prioritize what to automate first.
Senior Software Test Engineer / QA ManagerSep 2020 – Mar 2021
Stellar Technology Solutions — Remote
  • Led the team's transition to Agile/Scrum and introduced QA best practices including test plan structure, defect management, and release readiness criteria.
  • Acted as liaison between clients and engineering, translating business requirements into testable scenarios and acceptance criteria.
Quality Assurance Engineer / SDETMar 2016 – Aug 2020
TruQC — Remote
  • Spearheaded the design and rollout of an automated UI test suite using Nightwatch.js and Browserstack; scaled coverage from 5 to 100+ tests.
  • Contributed iOS UI tests using XCUITest for the companion mobile app.
  • Reviewed and improved test plans to ensure comprehensive coverage of system requirements across web and mobile.
Quality Assurance ConsultantJun 2008 – Dec 2015
Quacon Testing Services — Houston, TX (Remote)
  • QA consultant for web projects across oil & gas, technology, and digital advertising sectors.
  • Executed manual and automated cross-browser testing (Selenium IDE) and managed defect tracking in JIRA, Bugzilla, and SharePoint.
  • Led QA for the Chevron annual report site project, coordinating across creative, dev, and client stakeholders.

Education & Certifications

Bachelor of Science — University of Houston, Houston, TX
Certified Scrum Master (CSM) — Scrum Alliance, April 2021
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Pauline McHugh
Senior QA Automation Engineer | SDET
EMAILmchughpf@gmail.com
LOCATIONHouston, TX
LINKEDINlinkedin.com/in/pfmchugh
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