me

Quality-obsessed. Still building on the side.

The short version: I test things for a living at Costco Travel, and I build things for fun.

Hunter Macias

Hi, I'm Hunter Macias.

Quality Engineer II · Costco Travel

I'm a Quality Engineer II at Costco Travel, where I work on the systems behind cruise, hotel, and vacation package bookings — the kind of software where a missed edge case means a real customer's trip goes sideways, not just a failed unit test.

My background is a mix of hands-on testing and systems thinking. I spend as much time reading logs in Splunk and profiling API latency as I do writing test automation, and I'd rather catch a problem upstream than triage it downstream. Most of what I build reflects that: shift-left contract tests, self-service performance tooling, CI-integrated vulnerability monitoring — things that move quality earlier in the pipeline instead of bolting it on at the end.

Before testing became the job, it was practice. I spent a few years teaching kids to code at TheCoderSchool and Mission Bit, and I still build side projects on my own time — partly to stay sharp on the other side of the stack, partly because I like building things. Below is a rundown of both: the professional work, and the stuff I build for fun.

Email meSee my work

Work

Quality Engineer II at Costco Travel

I own quality, performance, and release confidence for the ongoing modernization of Costco Travel's cruise search platform. Most of what I build lives upstream of the bug: a shift-left contract testing practice, a self-service performance platform on k6 and Jenkins that validated 63–99% latency reductions across key search endpoints, and CI-integrated dependency monitoring that catches vulnerabilities before they become org-wide advisories. The full breakdown, with the reasoning behind each one, is on the Creating page.

Before that, I spent 16 months as a Software Development Engineer in Test writing automated and manual tests in Java, JavaScript, and SQL across the full testing stack — API, observability, and UI regression — shipping QA coverage behind several of the bigger launches on the roadmap, including a new market launch and a full CMS migration.

Outside of work I still build, usually with the same stack I use professionally. Before quality engineering was the job, teaching was — a few years as a coding instructor at TheCoderSchool and Mission Bit, which is probably where the habit of explaining my reasoning, not just stating a result, comes from. If you want to talk shop about test strategy or performance engineering, I'm reachable on LinkedIn or by email.

Outside of work

What I read and follow