Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 5+ test engineers across varying experience levels.
Set technical direction for the team frameworks, standards, tooling, and automation strategy.
Manage sprint workload, priorities, and cross-team coordination across multiple concurrent projects.
Represent the QA function in leadership discussions, sprint planning, and architectural reviews.
Build a team culture grounded in ownership, craftsmanship, and continuous improvement.
Design and execute comprehensive test strategies for distributed, microservices-based backend systems.
Validate system behavior under real-world conditions including network partitions, service failures, message queue backlogs, and high concurrency.
Test message-driven and event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ) for correctness, ordering guarantees, and failure recovery.
Validate data consistency, idempotency, and correctness across distributed components and databases.
Build and maintain backend service integration and contract tests.
Design and maintain automated UI test suites for web-based applications using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium.
Own performance testing strategy designing, executing, and analyzing load, stress, soak, and spike tests.
Investigate, triage, and resolve test failures — distinguishing flaky tests from real defects.
Partner closely with developers, architects, and product teams to understand requirements and surface quality risks early.

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
5+ years of hands-on experience in software testing, with strong coverage of both backend and frontend systems
2+ years leading or mentoring a QA team, with direct experience managing 5+ engineers preferred.
Proven experience testing distributed systems microservices, event-driven architectures, or message brokers.
Proficiency in UI automation using Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or equivalent.
Strong programming skills in Python, Java, or JavaScript able to write production-quality test code.
Experience with API testing tools such as Postman, REST Assured, or similar.
Solid experience with performance and load testing tools (k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust, or similar).
Understanding of distributed systems concepts: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, retry logic, circuit breakers, timeouts.
Experience working in Linux/Unix environments.
Familiarity with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
Strong analytical mindset with attention to edge cases, failure modes, and non-obvious system interactions.
Experience with containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes) is a strong asset.
Familiarity with observability tooling (logs, metrics, tracing) to support test investigation.

Senior Software Test Engineer

Key skills