4 months ago
Nairobi, KenyaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Embed in one engineering squad and participate in planning, standups, reviews, and retrospectives.
- Define acceptance criteria and own the squad’s Definition of Done quality gate.
- Write and maintain unit, integration, and end-to-end automated test suites.
- Define QA standards covering test structure, automation tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds, and CI gate configuration.
- Own automation framework selection, evolution, documentation, and deprecation of outdated tools.
- Onboard QA engineers into chapter standards and run the monthly QA Guild.
- Report coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlog, and systemic quality issues to the Head of Engineering.
Requirements
- 5+ years of software QA experience, including at least 2 years in a Lead QA role driving test strategy across more than one team.
- Strong automation engineering skills with the ability to write maintainable, readable, production-standard test code that runs reliably in CI.
- Deep experience with API testing, REST, contract testing, and integration test design.
- Experience defining and maintaining QA standards in an embedded Agile squad environment.
- Experience with Java-based backend environments, including reading Java code and writing representative tests.
- Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services is strongly preferred.
- Experience with performance and load testing is strongly preferred.
- Mobile app testing experience is mandatory for one QA Chapter role covering the Android surface.
- Experience building or evolving a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice across multiple teams is strongly preferred.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs is strongly preferred.
Benefits
- Location: Nairobi.
- Reports to the Head of Engineering and works across four squads with approximately 4–6 embedded QA engineers.
- The role is a technical lead and standards-setter, not a line-management or standalone QA manager position.
About watu
Watu is a Nairobi-headquartered asset finance company that provides loans for mobility and connectivity assets, such as motorcycles and smartphones, to unbanked and underserved consumers and micro-entrepreneurs. It earns revenue from loan interest and fees and supports digital repayments and compliance services around the financed assets. Founded in 2015, Watu operates in eight African countries and reports issuing over 2 million loans.