whoami_
Ben Armour
The person behind every verified build.
Four years of test automation, risk-based planning, and full defect lifecycle ownership, most recently building the QA architecture behind 4 million+ digital menu boards for the world’s biggest fast-food brands.
Background_
Four years of high-stakes QA.
STRATACACHE
Software Quality Analyst II
May 2024 - Feb 2026
Built a 150+ test client-agnostic Cypress framework from scratch, one shared core with per-brand configuration covering 8+ QSR brands, wired into CI as a merge-blocking quality gate. Led risk-based test planning for menu board launches across Tim Hortons, McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, and Burger King, on a platform behind 4 million+ digital menu boards. Chased environment defects down to embedded Linux/ARM media players in a 1:1 production-parity lab.
UC IT Solutions Center
QA Automation Engineer
Aug 2022 - May 2024
Built Cypress suites across four criminal justice platforms, including Ohio's first-of-its-kind statewide sentencing database for the Ohio Supreme Court and a risk assessment system used by corrections agencies in multiple states, raising regression coverage by 75%. Validated enterprise React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL systems across 9+ concurrent projects, from monorepo builds to Dockerized microservices, for clients including Brooksource and Macy's.
Skills & Tools_
Ship proof, not promises.
Automation decides what ships.
I design the architecture, not just the specs: frameworks built around a shared core, so a single suite scales across products instead of forking per team. Every REST endpoint validated across its full request/response cycle, because silent integration failures never announce themselves. The suites run in CI as merge-blocking quality gates with failure videos attached to every run. If the build is red, it does not ship.
Exploration finds what automation can’t.
Tooling proves what you already know to check; the rest you go find. Risk-based planning decides where the hours go, exploratory and regression cycles run against environments held to production parity, and I own every defect through the full lifecycle with root cause analysis that ends in the code, not in a ticket comment. I communicate release readiness plainly to developers, PMs, and stakeholders.
Off the clock_
Built, not bought.
Curiosity keeps its own hours.
Most of what I do off the clock still involves building something: custom mechanical keyboards, built and soldered by hand, around 20 so far with a different board on my desk most weeks, and a homelab that self-hosts anything that sits still. The rest is hikes with my wife and our dog, and the video games that pulled me toward tech in the first place.
status / open to work
education / aug 2020 - apr 2024
University of Cincinnati
BS Information Technology, concentrations in Software Development and Game Design & Simulation, completed while working QA at the university’s IT Solutions Center.
extra / tooling & open source
I build the tooling I wish existed.
Chrome extensions and browser tooling built for the QA team: a Jira test case helper and a full UI overhaul for ActiVia, STRATACACHE’s media platform. OSS contributor to NuvioTV, an Android TV streaming app, tracing playback defects to the codec level.
extra / ai-assisted
AI-assisted, human-verified.
Multiple AI models coordinated through custom skills, MCP servers, and hook automation. The review at every checkpoint stays human.
the kit _
off hours /