Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Watu Credit is a fintech company focused on providing financial services and device financing to underserved customers in Africa and Latin America. They are seeking a Senior QA Engineer to act as the technical authority on quality within a squad, responsible for test architecture, performance testing, and mentoring other QA Engineers.
Responsibilities
- Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, review, retrospective - as a full member of the squad, not a downstream recipient of work
- Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint, and push back on ambiguity before development starts, not after
- Own test architecture for your squad's domain - the structure of the test pyramid, how unit, integration, contract, and E2E tests fit together, and where the squad's coverage gaps are
- Lead performance and load testing for your squad - establishing baselines, identifying throughput and concurrency limits, and surfacing risk before it reaches production
- Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate, and act as the final internal check before anything ships to staging or production
- Mentor QA Engineers in your squad and across the chapter - reviewing their test design, raising the bar on automation quality, and helping them grow into the standards the Chapter Lead sets
- Deputise for the QA Chapter Lead where needed - representing your squad's QA practice in the monthly QA Guild, and contributing directly to chapter-wide standards, tooling decisions, and onboarding material
- Own a chapter-level initiative - for example, the contract-testing framework, the performance-testing toolkit, or AI-assisted test generation - evaluating, implementing, and documenting it for the whole function
- Triage the squad's hardest test failures - distinguishing flaky tests from real regressions in complex, high-traffic, or high-risk areas of the system
- Use AI/LLM tooling actively: test case generation, synthetic test data, regression triage, and documentation are all areas where AI accelerates QA work
Skills
- 5+ years of QA engineering experience in a software product environment, with a track record of owning test strategy for a complex domain, not just executing within it
- Strong automation engineering skills - you write test code to a production standard, in Java, Python, or JavaScript, and your suites are maintainable, readable, and stable in CI
- API testing depth - REST API testing, contract testing, integration test design, HTTP semantics, and JSON schema validation
- Experience with performance and load testing - you can design and run load tests, interpret throughput and concurrency results, and translate them into engineering action
- Comfortable operating without a QA manager above you, and confident enough in your technical judgement to mentor others and represent QA practice beyond your own squad
- Experience in Java-based backend environments - you can read Java code, understand the architecture, and write tests that reflect it accurately
- Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services - you understand the stakes of testing systems that move money
- Experience with contract testing (Pact or equivalent) in a microservices environment
- Mobile app testing experience - Android in particular, whether automation (Espresso, Appium) or structured manual testing with a regression framework
- Experience mentoring other QA engineers, running internal training, or contributing to a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice
- Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling - test case generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs
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