Principal QA Engineer

Position Summary

As the Principal Quality Assurance Engineer at Merwel Inc, you will play a critical leadership role in overseeing the quality of our major financial services client’s highly complex and mission-critical engineering and development efforts. You will strategically guide an Agile team of skilled engineers to ensure the delivery of high-quality, robust, and secure technical solutions across the entire software development lifecycle. This role demands the application of advanced theoretical and practical knowledge in software engineering, quality assurance, and systems architecture, involving close collaboration with engineering leaders, senior management, and end users to drive comprehensive quality assurance protocols and best practices.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Quality Governance & Oversight: Oversee all stages of the software development lifecycle, from conception through deployment, to ensure stringent adherence to highly specialized quality standards for complex enterprise-level software, cloud platforms, and data systems. This includes establishing and enforcing quality gates and metrics.

• Advanced Test Strategy Design & Implementation: Design, develop, and execute comprehensive and highly intricate test strategies and plans to validate the functionality, performance, scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness of multi-tiered, distributed, and high-volume financial systems. This requires a deep understanding of system architecture, data integrity, and complex integration patterns.

• Automated Testing Pipeline Architecture & Leadership: Lead the architectural design, development, and implementation of advanced, end-to-end automated testing pipelines across diverse technology stacks. Collaborate extensively with cross-functional teams, including software, systems, infrastructure, and network engineers, to integrate automated testing seamlessly into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) frameworks, ensuring robust DevSecOps practices.

• Quality Assurance Protocol Development & Enforcement: Develop, implement, and continuously refine sophisticated quality assurance protocols, methodologies, and best practices (e.g., TDD, BDD, ATDD) across all development stages, ensuring the highest standards of reliability, performance, and security for critical financial applications.

• Stakeholder Engagement & Continuous Improvement: Engage proactively with senior stakeholders, product owners, and end users to gather granular feedback, translate complex business requirements into testable scenarios, and continuously improve testing processes. Champion a culture of quality, test-driven development, and operational excellence to optimize test cycles and reduce technical debt.

• Root Cause Analysis & Solutioning: Conduct in-depth analysis and documentation of complex test results, identifying root causes of defects, performance bottlenecks, and security vulnerabilities. Provide actionable, data-driven recommendations and innovative technical solutions to resolve critical issues.

• Mentorship & Technical Leadership: Mentor, coach, and technically lead a team of quality engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning, professional development, and technical innovation within the QA organization. Drive adoption of new testing tools, technologies, and methodologies.

• Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) Expertise: Design and implement high-level automated test cases in Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) format based on intricate user stories and complex business rules, ensuring alignment between business expectations and technical validation.

Required Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a closely related quantitative or engineering discipline is required. A Master’s degree in a related field is highly preferred.

• Experience: 9+ years of progressive, hands-on experience in QA engineering or related fields, with a proven track record of leading quality assurance for complex, multi-tiered enterprise systems, preferably within the financial services industry.

Methodologies & Tools: 7+ years of experience designing and executing tests using modern testing methodologies (e.g., Agile, DevOps, Shift-Left Testing) and advanced testing tools.

• Leadership: Proven leadership experience managing and mentoring engineers or technical teams, demonstrating the ability to drive strategic quality initiatives.

• Analytical & Problem-Solving Skills: Exceptional analytical, debugging, and troubleshooting skills, with the ability to diagnose and resolve highly complex technical issues across various system components.

• Programming Proficiency: Demonstrated proficiency in multiple programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Golang, C/C++), including expertise in at least one modern front-end framework (e.g., Angular, React, Vue).

• Operating Environments: Extensive experience with UNIX/Linux and Windows environments, including command-line utilities for testing, diagnostics, and system analysis.

Preferred Qualifications

• Financial Services Expertise: Direct experience handling sensitive financial data or working within the highly regulated financial services industry, understanding compliance and security requirements.

• Cybersecurity Background: Background in cybersecurity, including relevant coursework, certifications, or practical experience in security testing (e.g., penetration testing, vulnerability assessment).

• Test Automation & CI/CD: 5+ years of experience with advanced test automation, including designing and setting up comprehensive automation frameworks and integrating them into CI/CD pipelines.

• Automation Tools: Familiarity and hands-on experience with a wide range of industry standard automation tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, TestComplete, Eggplant, Appium, Perfecto, ReadyAPI, JMeter, LoadRunner, etc.

• DevOps Ecosystem: Experience with tools like GitHub, JIRA, Xray, and a strong understanding of DevSecOps practices and tools (e.g., Jenkins, SonarQube, Fortify).