Senior QA/Operations Engineer

I find the bugs before your users do.

A decade of hunting defects on purpose — across apps, APIs, and the occasional stubborn BLE device. Currently senior QA at a wearables company, owning quality end to end.

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Portrait of Perry Benes smiling at the camera

Somewhere between the test plan and the coffee machine.

About

The person who asks "but what if…?" in every meeting.

I've been chasing quality for over 20 years — first in photography, then in manufacturing, now in tech. The tools change with every field, but the question never does: why did nobody catch this?

Those years taught me that quality is a team effort. I've worked with very different people in very different contexts — engineers, developers, designers, product managers — and my job has always been getting them to collaborate on the same goal. In software, that's meant testing health apps, medical devices, and the full product suite of a wearables platform — web, mobile, desktop, and the backend behind it all.

Experience

More than just testing.

My software career started in consumer health, where I spent a few years testing apps and connected medical devices for the US market. That meant both sides of the street — fast-moving consumer products with millions of real users, and regulated, multinational R&D where rigor is non-negotiable.

These days I'm as much an enabler as a tester. Owning QA and operations at a wearables company, I build testing infrastructure from the ground up, keep data consistent across distributed services, and drive team-wide adoption of new tooling — most recently AI and MCP-based workflows that tie our systems together.

How I work

Four things I believe about testing.

  1. Bugs cluster where assumptions live.

    The riskiest code isn't the complex code — it's the code everyone was sure was fine. I start where the team stopped asking questions.

  2. Automate the boring, explore the weird.

    Regression suites buy me time; exploratory sessions are where I spend it. A machine checks what we expected — a human finds what we didn't.

  3. A bug report is a piece of writing.

    Reproducible steps, honest severity, zero blame. A good report gets fixed in a day; a vague one gets argued about for a sprint.

  4. Quality is a team sport.

    I'm not a gate at the end of the pipeline — I'm in the design review asking how we'll know it works. The cheapest bug is the one never written.

Skills

The toolbox, briefly.

Testing

  • System & integration testing
  • End-to-end & regression
  • API testing
  • Performance & load
  • Exploratory testing
  • BLE & hardware-software integration
  • E2E encryption & signals testing

Automation & tooling

  • Python (Pytest, Playwright, Robot Framework)
  • Selenium & Appium (Java)
  • FastAPI
  • k6 & JMeter
  • Postman / Swagger / REST
  • MongoDB & SQL
  • AWS (ECS, ECR, CloudWatch) & Docker
  • Jira / X-ray

Operations & AI

  • Data integrity & management
  • Observability (PostHog, Sentry)
  • AI & MCP workflows (Claude, Cursor)
  • Cross-team enablement

Process

  • Agile / Scrum
  • Test planning (STP, STR, STD)
  • Regulated environments (health)

Hobbies

Off the clock, still exploring.

  • Cooking

    Recipes are just test plans with tastier acceptance criteria.

  • Swimming in the sea

    Open water, no lanes, no ticket queue.

  • Long walks

    Where the best debugging hunches tend to surface.