Senior QA Engineer

Senior QA Engineer Watu · Technology Organisation · Reports to Tech Lead | Location | Europe | | --- | --- | | Reports to | Tech Lead of assigned squad (standards & tooling: QA Chapter Lead) | | --- | --- | | Squad embedding | One Senior QA Engineer per squad on complex or high-risk domains - full member of all ceremonies, all sprints | | --- | --- | | Seniority | Senior - 5+ years QA engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership within a squad | | --- | --- | ## About Watu Watu is a fintech company operating across Africa and Latin America, providing device financing and financial services to customers historically excluded from the formal financial system. We finance motorcycles, smartphones and other productive assets through a technology-first, data-driven approach - enabling customers to own income-generating assets and build credit histories. Our platform supports millions of customer journeys across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and beyond, with continued expansion into LATAM. ## The Role As a Senior QA Engineer at Watu, you are embedded in a squad - the senior technical authority on quality within it. You do everything a QA Engineer does - ceremonies, acceptance criteria, automated test suites, the Definition of Done - but you also own the harder problems: test architecture, performance and load testing, contract testing, and the squad's most complex integration surfaces. You report to your squad's Tech Lead for day-to-day work. For QA standards and tooling, you sit in the QA Chapter led by the QA Chapter Lead, who reports to the Head of Engineering. You are the natural deputy to the QA Chapter Lead - representing your squad in the QA Guild when needed, mentoring QA Engineers across the chapter, and often owning a specific chapter-wide initiative (a framework, a tooling migration, a testing discipline) end to end. This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a management role. You lead through technical depth and example, not through authority over other QA engineers' day-to-day work. ## What You Will Do - Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, review, retrospective - as a full member of the squad, not a downstream recipient of work. - Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint, and push back on ambiguity before development starts, not after. - Own test architecture for your squad's domain - the structure of the test pyramid, how unit, integration, contract, and E2E tests fit together, and where the squad's coverage gaps are. - Lead performance and load testing for your squad - establishing baselines, identifying throughput and concurrency limits, and surfacing risk before it reaches production. - Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate, and act as the final internal check before anything ships to staging or production. - Mentor QA Engineers in your squad and across the chapter - reviewing their test design, raising the bar on automation quality, and helping them grow into the standards the Chapter Lead sets. - Deputise for the QA Chapter Lead where needed - representing your squad's QA practice in the monthly QA Guild, and contributing directly to chapter-wide standards, tooling decisions, and onboarding material. - Own a chapter-level initiative - for example, the contract-testing framework, the performance-testing toolkit, or AI-assisted test generation - evaluating, implementing, and documenting it for the whole function. - Triage the squad's hardest test failures - distinguishing flaky tests from real regressions in complex, high-traffic, or high-risk areas of the system. - Use AI/LLM tooling actively: test case generation, synthetic test data, regression triage, and documentation are all areas where AI accelerates QA work. ## Who You Are ### Essential - 5+ years of QA engineering experience in a software product environment, with a track record of owning test strategy for a complex domain, not just executing within it.…