Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

Position Summary

The Senior QA Engineer is an experienced quality practitioner who designs test strategy for substantial feature areas, owns automation frameworks and coverage, and drives quality conversations across product and engineering. Senior QA Engineers act as the trusted quality counterpart to Senior Software Engineers and Senior Product Managers, bringing independent judgement about risk, coverage, and release-readiness. They are expected to raise the quality bar across DIME - not only through the defects they find but through the processes, tooling, and culture they build.

Reporting Line

• Reports to: Quality Assurance Lead (with a direct escalation line to the CTO on matters of release risk).
• Works closely with: Application Manager / Senior Engineer, Senior Software Engineers, SDETs, Product Managers, Payment Services Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Cybersecurity Specialist.
• Mentors: Junior and mid-level QA Engineers, SDETs learning testing craft, rotating interns.

Key Responsibilities

• Test strategy ownership: Own the test strategy for one or more product areas - e-commerce / web, mobile, API, or in-store POS - covering functional, regression, performance, compatibility, accessibility, security, and compliance dimensions. Document the strategy and keep it current.
• Risk-based test planning: For each release or feature, produce a risk-based test plan that prioritises coverage where the consequences of defects are greatest. Communicate residual risk to the QA Lead, Product, and Engineering so release decisions are informed.
• Automation framework ownership: Own and evolve DIME's test automation frameworks for web, mobile, and API. Decide on tooling, write core framework code (page objects, fixtures, helpers, custom commands), review automation pull requests from QA Engineers and SDETs, and keep the framework healthy and fast.
• CI/CD integration: Partner with the DevOps Engineer to integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines with sensible gating policies, parallel execution, flake management, and actionable reporting.
• Performance and resilience testing: Design and execute performance, load, stress, soak, and chaos tests for DIME's payment services. Interpret results and work with engineering to remediate bottlenecks before they reach production.
• Compliance and security testing: Design and execute test scenarios that validate DIME's obligations under PCI DSS, the Jamaican Data Protection Act, 2020, and AML/CFT regulations - for example, KYC flows, transaction monitoring edge cases, logging and audit trails, and sensitive-data handling.
• Release gatekeeping: In collaboration with the QA Lead, own the go / no-go sign-off for assigned releases, providing clear, evidence-based release notes that describe what was tested, what was found, what was fixed, and what residual risks remain.
• Defect triage leadership: Run defect triage meetings for your product area, classify severity and priority consistently, challenge unclear reports, and drive resolution timelines with engineering.
• Mentorship and team building: Coach junior QA Engineers on test design, automation craftsmanship, defect reporting, and professional development. Contribute to interviewing and onboarding new QA hires alongside the QA Lead and Talent Acquisition Specialist.
• Process improvement: Identify bottlenecks, wasteful practices, or gaps in DIME's QA process and drive improvements - shift-left practices, contract testing, better observability in test environments, exploratory testing charters, or whatever the evidence points to.
• Customer empathy: Partner with Customer Support Specialists and the Customer Success Manager to learn from production issues, convert them into regression tests, and feed patterns back into test strategy.
• Startup ownership: In a small team, step beyond strict role boundaries when needed - help with customer escalations, investor due-diligence artefacts, or audit evidence - while protecting the focused QA work that only you can do.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a closely related discipline, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
• Five or more years of professional QA / test engineering experience, including at least two years in a role where you owned test strategy or automation frameworks for a production product.
• Strong proficiency in at least one test automation stack for web and API (for example, Selenium / WebDriver, Cypress, Playwright, REST Assured, Postman / Newman).
• Demonstrable programming ability in at least one of JavaScript / TypeScript, Python, or Java, sufficient to write and review framework-level code.
• Solid working knowledge of SQL and the ability to design test data and verify results at the database level.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or similar) and the integration of automated tests into delivery pipelines.
• Experience with defect-tracking and test-management tools (Jira, Azure DevOps, TestRail, Zephyr, Xray).
• Strong written and spoken English, including the ability to produce test strategies, release reports, and risk assessments.
• Eligibility to work in Jamaica.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in fintech, payments, banking, or another regulated domain, with specific exposure to PCI DSS, PSD2, ISO 20022, or equivalent frameworks.
• Experience with performance-testing tools (k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust) and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic).
• Experience with mobile test automation (Appium, Espresso, XCUITest).
• Certifications such as ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Analyst, Test Automation Engineer, or Test Manager), Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA), Selenium Certified Professional, or Certified ScrumMaster.
• Experience operating within an ISO 27001, SOC 2, or PCI DSS audit environment.
• Experience with contract testing, service virtualisation, or chaos engineering.

Core Competencies

• Strategic quality thinking - sees the whole system, not just the feature in front of them.
• Strong engineering craft in automation code.
• Clear, firm, respectful communication - can say "this is not ready to ship" and make it stick.
• Mentorship mindset - measurably raises the quality of the QA engineers around them.
• Calm under release pressure; judgement under ambiguity.
• Commercial awareness - understands how quality affects revenue, trust, and compliance.