Cale Maynard
Senior Automation Engineer (SDET) · Columbia, Maryland · remote-friendly
From clicking through claims to building the machines that click
Chapter one: manual, regulated, unforgiving. I started in QA testing state Medicaid systems — HIPAA claims, EDI transactions, IVR phone trees, the kind of software where a wrong edge case means someone's healthcare claim gets denied. Manual testing at that stakes level teaches you what quality actually costs. It also teaches you exactly which hours a machine should be doing instead.
Chapter two: build the machine. I implemented my first company's first end-to-end automation strategy, then went on to design a Playwright framework from the ground up for an enterprise assessment platform — 5,000+ tests authored, regression time down more than a third, database-level validation checking the data behind every screen. The suite runs on every build. When it fails, I pull the commits and find the exact change that broke it.
Chapter three: automate more than tests. The same discipline that makes a test suite trustworthy — idempotency, audit trails, human gates, observability — makes any automation trustworthy. Lately I apply it to AI systems: agentic pipelines that do real work unattended and can prove what they did. One of them is running right now.
Three rules that don't bend
Nothing ships on "it should work." Every build ends with the thing running and the checks green — this site included.
A retry that hides a race condition is a bug with better manners. I fix causes; the symptoms stop on their own.
Costs stated before benefits. The break-even chart on this site shows automation's price tag first — on purpose.
Receipts
- 10+ yrs in quality engineering — regulated government & enterprise SaaS
- 5,000+ automated tests authored
- 35% faster regression after leading a Selenium → Playwright migration
- 1,200+ tests in a single production suite, on every build
- 6 autonomous AI routines running unattended in a personal production system
- Security+ certified · Agile/Scrum · HIPAA-regulated delivery experience
The best part of the job is still a hard problem.
Have a testing or automation problem worth solving? I'd like to hear about it.
Let's talk automation