Joana Costa
Verified Expert in Engineering
Quality Engineer and Developer
Santa Clara, United States
Toptal member since August 31, 2026
Joana is a staff-level software quality engineer with over 10 years of experience in test strategy and automation for customer-facing systems. Her primary expertise is in automation strategy, risk analysis, and release readiness for eCommerce platforms, where she thrives in cross-functional engineering environments. She defined test and automation strategies for 500+ eCommerce websites while at Fanatics.
Portfolio
Experience
- Requirements Analysis - 10 years
- UI Testing - 10 years
- Risk Analysis - 10 years
- Test Automation - 10 years
- Integration Testing - 10 years
- Selenium WebDriver - 8 years
- JavaScript - 8 years
- Playwright - 3 years
Preferred Environment
Git, GitLab, Jenkins, Jira, TestRail, Sauce Labs
The most amazing...
...automation strategy I've defined is for 500+ eCommerce websites, ensuring consistent quality and safe releases across distributed teams.
Work Experience
Staff Quality Engineer
Fanatics
- Defined test and automation strategies for distributed customer-facing platforms, partnering with engineering teams to identify quality risks, establish coverage, and drive release readiness across 500+ eCommerce websites.
- Led quality validation for AI-powered customer support experiences across chat and voice, testing conversational behavior, customer workflows, back end integrations, fallback and escalation paths, and data consistency.
- Investigated complex conversational AI failures using Dialogflow, Sierra logs, API responses, and conversation history to isolate behavioral issues, identify probable root causes, and collaborate with engineers on fixes.
- Developed and maintained UI and API automation using JavaScript, Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, Postman, and Newman, expanding regression coverage across customer-facing and integrated workflows.
- Led quality strategy for a shared A/B experimentation platform, defining test plans across internal tooling, customer-facing experiments, integrated services, and downstream reporting to support safe rollouts.
- Validated data and workflows across APIs and integrated services, identifying inconsistencies across system boundaries and ensuring reliable business-critical customer experiences.
- Partnered with product managers and engineering teams from requirements through release, aligning test strategy, risks, quality findings, and release-readiness decisions.
Senior Quality Engineer
Fanatics
- Led release readiness across distributed QE teams in the US, Brazil, and India, coordinating test execution, risk assessment, and quality status for 20+ monthly production releases.
- Served as the sole quality engineer for an internal platform supporting 500+ eCommerce sites and 28+ business-critical tools, owning test strategy, release validation, and quality decisions.
- Designed risk-based test coverage across UI, API, integration, and end-to-end workflows, expanding regression coverage for critical scenarios.
- Developed and maintained Selenium WebDriver automation for high-priority customer workflows.
Quality Engineer Consultant
Avenue Code
- Delivered quality engineering for enterprise web applications across multiple consulting engagements.
- Developed UI automation using JavaScript and Selenium WebDriver to expand regression coverage.
- Integrated automated test suites into Jenkins CI pipelines, enabling continuous validation and faster feedback on application changes.
- Collaborated with developers, product owners, and business stakeholders to identify quality risks, investigate defects, and validate releases.
- Created and maintained test plans, test cases, and defect reports to support release readiness across multiple consulting engagements.
Experience
Quality Engineering Automation Framework
https://github.com/costajdac/Education
Bachelor's Degree in Information Systems
Pontifical Catholic University - Brazil
Certifications
ISTQB CTFL
International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB)
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Playwright, Selenium WebDriver, Newman
Tools
Postman, Dialogflow, Git, GitLab, Jenkins, Jira, TestRail, Claude Code, GitHub
Paradigms
Requirements Analysis, Test Automation, Automated Testing, Manual Testing, Automation, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Software Testing, Agile Project Management, Agile Software Development, E2E Testing
Languages
JavaScript, Python
Other
Test Strategy, Risk Analysis, UI Testing, Integration Testing, Quality Assurance (QA), Manual QA, Test Planning, Test Cases, Test Case Creation, Conversational AI Testing, Distributed Systems Testing, Chromium, QA Testing, Sauce Labs, Promptfoo, LLM-as-Judge, API Testing, Software Development, Software Engineering, Systems Analysis, Business Systems Analysis, Web Development, Data Structures
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring