Senior Test Analyst

Job Title: Senior Test Analyst

Employment type: Contract

Contract length: 6 months

Location: Johannesburg -South Africa

PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT

We are seeking a seasoned Test Analyst with strong experience in card payments testing to support the delivery of high-quality payment solutions. The ideal candidate will have solid knowledge of ISO8583 messaging, hands-on experience with Base24, and a strong understanding of card transaction message flows, including 100, 200, 400 transaction types. Experience in prepaid card systems will be highly advantageous.

This role will be responsible for planning, preparing, and executing test activities across payment and transaction processing systems, ensuring that solutions are robust, accurate, and meet business and technical requirements.

Core Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Design, prepare, execute, and document test cases, test scenarios, and test scripts.
• Perform functional, integration, system, and regression testing for card and payment-related applications.
• Validate and analyse ISO8583 message formats and transaction processing flows.
• Test and verify Base24 transaction flows, including online and exception message handling.
• Work with transaction types such as 100, 200, 400, and related lifecycle/message flows.
• Identify, log, track, and retest defects through to closure.
• Collaborate closely with business analysts, developers, operations teams, and project stakeholders.
• Support test data preparation and environment validation.
• Review business and technical requirements to ensure complete test coverage.
• Participate in defect triage, root cause discussions, and quality improvement initiatives.
• Produce clear and accurate test execution reports and status updates.
• Contribute to test planning, estimation, and risk identification for project deliverables.

Knowledge and Experience:

• Strong card payments knowledge, including a sound understanding of ISO8583.
• Hands-on Base24 knowledge, including Tokens
• Various Base24 transaction types
• Understanding of 100, 200, 400 message flows
• Proven experience as a seasoned Tester in payments, cards, or transaction switching environments.
• Strong understanding of end-to-end transaction testing and message validation.
• Experience creating and executing structured test cases and defect reports.
• Ability to analyse transaction behaviour and investigate failures across integrated systems.
• Good communication skills with the ability to work across technical and business teams.
• Strong attention to detail and a methodical approach to testing.
• Industry-recognised testing certification such as ISTQB would be beneficial.

Mandatory Skills:

• Relevant experience in software testing / QA
• Bachelor's degree in Technology, or a related field (Master's preferred).
• Previous experience within Banking, Digital Payment & Card solutions or the FinTech industry.
• Excellent communication skills (written, verbal, and presentation) in English.

Preferred Skills:

• Prepaid card experience.
• Experience working in ATM, POS, switching, acquiring, or issuer processing environments.
• Knowledge of test management and defect tracking tools.
• Exposure to API, interface, or back-end testing in payment ecosystems.
• Experience in Agile, Waterfall, or hybrid delivery environments.
• Card issuing or acquiring systems.
• Payment switching platforms.
• Settlement and reconciliation flows.
• Tokenisation and card lifecycle events.