What You Will Own

As embedded QA engineer in your squad

Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, retrospective. QA is in the room from the start, not brought in at the end.
Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint. Stories without clear acceptance criteria do not enter the sprint.
Write and maintain automated test suites for your squad's domain - unit, integration, E2E as appropriate. Test coverage is your responsibility.
Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate - nothing ships without passing the criteria you have defined and maintained.

As QA Chapter Lead across your function

Define and maintain QA standards for the function: test pyramid structure, automation tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds, and CI gate configuration.
Onboard new QA engineers into the chapter - they join a squad, but they join your standards. Define the onboarding process and the baseline expectations.
Run the monthly QA Guild with the counterpart Chapter Lead from the other engineering function. Alignment on tooling, shared frameworks, and Definition of Done consistency across the full engineering organization.
Own the automation framework selection and evolution - evaluate new tooling, deprecate old, and maintain documentation that any QA engineer can follow.
Report to the Head of Engineering on QA chapter health: coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlog, and any systemic quality issues.

Who You Are

Essential

5+ years of software QA experience with at least 2 years in a Lead QA role where you drove test strategy across more than one team.
Strong automation engineering skills - you write test code to a production standard. Your test suites are maintainable, readable, and run reliably in CI.
Experience with API testing at depth: REST, contract testing, integration test design. Most of Watu's QA surface area is backend and API-level.
Experience defining and maintaining QA standards in an Agile squad environment - not as a gatekeeper at the end of a sprint, but as an embedded contributor from day one.
Experience in Java-based backend environments - you can read Java code, understand the architecture, and write tests that reflect it accurately.

Strongly preferred

Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services - you understand what it means to test systems that move money.
Experience with performance and load testing - understanding payment rail throughput, API concurrency limits, and how to surface them before production does.
Mobile app testing experience is mandatory for one of the QA Chapter roles (Android surface).
Experience building or evolving a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice across multiple teams.
Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling - test case generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs.

What You Will Own

As embedded QA engineer in your squad

Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, retrospective. QA is in the room from the start, not brought in at the end.
Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint. Stories without clear acceptance criteria do not enter the sprint.
Write and maintain automated test suites for your squad's domain - unit, integration, E2E as appropriate. Test coverage is your responsibility.
Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate - nothing ships without passing the criteria you have defined and maintained.

As QA Chapter Lead across your function

Define and maintain QA standards for the function: test pyramid structure, automation tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds, and CI gate configuration.
Onboard new QA engineers into the chapter - they join a squad, but they join your standards. Define the onboarding process and the baseline expectations.
Run the monthly QA Guild with the counterpart Chapter Lead from the other engineering function. Alignment on tooling, shared frameworks, and Definition of Done consistency across the full engineering organization.
Own the automation framework selection and evolution - evaluate new tooling, deprecate old, and maintain documentation that any QA engineer can follow.
Report to the Head of Engineering on QA chapter health: coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlog, and any systemic quality issues.

Who You Are

Essential

5+ years of software QA experience with at least 2 years in a Lead QA role where you drove test strategy across more than one team.
Strong automation engineering skills - you write test code to a production standard. Your test suites are maintainable, readable, and run reliably in CI.
Experience with API testing at depth: REST, contract testing, integration test design. Most of Watu's QA surface area is backend and API-level.
Experience defining and maintaining QA standards in an Agile squad environment - not as a gatekeeper at the end of a sprint, but as an embedded contributor from day one.
Experience in Java-based backend environments - you can read Java code, understand the architecture, and write tests that reflect it accurately.

Strongly preferred

Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services - you understand what it means to test systems that move money.
Experience with performance and load testing - understanding payment rail throughput, API concurrency limits, and how to surface them before production does.
Mobile app testing experience is mandatory for one of the QA Chapter roles (Android surface).
Experience building or evolving a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice across multiple teams.
Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling - test case generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs.

QA Chapter Lead

Watu Credit