Senior/Lead QA Engineer (Auto & Manual, in-house product) at SmartDev1

The Senior QA Engineer / QA Lead will own VeryPay's end-to-end quality strategy — leading the QA function, mentoring the team, and ensuring our platform meets the highest standards of correctness, reliability, and security before every release. This role combines hands-on technical depth with team leadership: you will define the test architecture, drive automation investment, champion quality culture across engineering, and act as the primary quality voice in cross-functional discussions. This role requires someone who can pair deep technical QA expertise with practical knowledge of AI-assisted testing workflows — from intelligent test generation to autonomous regression coverage. Test Strategy & Execution • Design end-to-end test strategies covering functional, integration, regression, performance, and security test layers across web, mobile, and backend services. • Build and maintain robust manual and automated test suites for NFC transaction flows, card lifecycle operations, wallet movements, and MMO integrations. • Ensure test coverage spans microservice boundaries (user, merchant, device, wallet, product, transaction, card services) including contract and integration testing at API gateways. • Design and execute multi-device test scenarios covering POS terminals, NFC card readers, mobile apps, and USSD channels - validating consistent behavior across hardware variants and OS versions. • Validate multi-tenant isolation: ensure that organisation, school, merchant, and agent tenant configurations produce correct, independent behavior without data leakage or cross-tenant interference.AI-Assisted Testing • Leverage AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Testim, Mabl, or equivalent LLM-assisted frameworks) to accelerate test case generation, coverage gap analysis, and regression suite maintenance. • Use AI-based log analysis and anomaly detection to proactively identify quality risks across CI/CD pipelines. • Design prompts and workflows for AI-assisted exploratory testing, including structured test scenario generation from product specifications and API schemas. • Stay current on evolving AI testing tooling and champion adoption of practical, secure AI workflows within the QA function - with appropriate caution in sensitive cryptographic and payment-critical paths.Fintech & Payment-Specific QA • Test NFC card transaction authorization flows, offline payment scenarios, and deferred HSM verification paths. • Validate double-entry ledger integrity, OVA (Open Value Account) balance consistency, and fund movement operations (Top-up, Payment, Funds In/Out). • Perform security-focused testing on payment token flows, JWT-based Partner API authentication (HS256 / ES256), and PCI-relevant data handling. • Collaborate with the HSM and cryptographic infrastructure teams to define and validate key injection, PIN encryption (scenarios A-D), and card personalization test cases.Production Support & Issue Verification • Serve as the QA point of contact for production incidents - reproduce reported issues in staging, confirm root cause, and verify fixes before re-deployment. • Maintain a structured hotfix verification workflow: fast-track regression scope, execute targeted smoke and regression suites, and provide go/no-go sign-off under time pressure. • Analyse production logs, monitoring dashboards (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK), and transaction traces to identify quality signals and prevent recurrence. • Maintain a living production issue register to track defect patterns, recurrence rate, and long-term remediation actions.Coordination with Development & Product Teams • Partner with product managers to translate feature requirements and acceptance criteria into testable specifications before development begins - enforcing a shift-left quality model. • Work directly with backend and frontend engineers during development cycles: review design documents for testability, participate in code reviews, and provide early QA feedback on pull requests. • Facilitate structured QA handoff processes: definition of done checklists, pre-release sign-off gates, and cross-team readiness reviews before each deployment. • Maintain open communication channels with development and product teams on active defects, test progress, and release readiness - ensuring no quality risks are surfaced late. • Own the overall QA strategy for VeryPay's platform - define standards, tooling decisions, and quality processes across the engineering team. • Lead, mentor, and grow a QA team (currently junior/mid engineers); conduct structured 1:1s, performance feedback, and skills development planning. • Drive test architecture decisions: framework selection, test pyramid balance, toolchain standardization, and technical debt management within the QA layer. • Act as the QA representative in sprint planning, architecture reviews, and cross-team technical discussions - advocating for quality requirements from inception. • Build a quality culture across the broader engineering team, not just within QA - through pairing, documentation, and shift-left practices.Quality Process & Reporting • Implement and maintain quality gates in CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or equivalent) including automated regression on every merge to main. • Define and track QA KPIs: defect escape rate, test coverage, automation ratio, mean time to detect (MTTD) - report to engineering leadership with actionable insights. • Own incident post-mortems from the quality perspective: root cause analysis, regression gap identification, and process improvement actions. • Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, backend engineers, DevOps, and integration partners to embed quality requirements early in the development lifecycle.