Senior QA Engineer

The Senior QA Engineer for Programmatic XP owns the quality strategy for our programmatic publishing capability, the systems that let publishers monetise their inventory and let advertisers buy placements across our network. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role inside a single squad, not a management position. You are the quality authority for the squad: you design and build the automation, you decide what "release-ready" means, and you raise the engineering bar of the developers around you through review, pairing and example rather than through headcount. The work is backend- and data-heavy. This is a high-throughput, real-time decisioning path plus a configuration surface. Most of your day is APIs, contracts, SQL and production signals with a real but secondary frontend surface.

Responsibilities

Own automated coverage of the squad's REST/JSON surfaces APIs and the high-throughput serving path; Build and maintain consumer-driven contract tests across service boundaries; Test decisioning logic, authentication, negative/malformed input, boundary/idempotency behaviour, versioning/backwards compatibility, and performance/latency; Trace events from capture through pipelines and validate customer-facing reports with SQL; Build the test-data strategy for realistic data; Test event-driven seams, message contracts, schema evolution, and failure modes; Own automated coverage of user-facing journeys across legacy server-rendered screens and modern TypeScript frontends; Read and interpret logs as a primary diagnostic skill; Use Grafana/monitoring tooling to define quality signals and release thresholds; Own quality for third-party and cross-system integrations; Apply AI to engineering workflows with critical judgment; Define and own the squad's test strategy; Embed quality gates into CI/CD; Define, track, and report quality metrics; Partner with Product Manager and Tech Lead; Raise the bar around you through pairing, onboarding, and mentoring.

Requirements

6+ years hands-on QA / SDET experience, with demonstrable recent ownership of automated coverage for a long-lived production product; API testing depth — this is the core of the role. You can talk concretely about the frameworks you have used, what you asserted, how you handled auth, negatives and versioning, and how you proved a write actually landed; Contract testing in practice. Hands-on experience with consumer-driven contract testing (Pact or equivalent) across service boundaries in CI — not just awareness of the concept; Strong SQL, used as a testing instrument. You independently query warehouses and operational databases to validate data and reports. BigQuery experience is strongly preferred; equivalent large-scale analytical SQL is acceptable; Event-driven testing experience. Hands-on with Kafka or an equivalent broker: schemas and contracts, ordering, duplication, replay, idempotency and consumer failure modes; UI automation competence. A modern framework (Playwright preferred) applied to stateful, multi-step journeys — plus the pragmatism to work with legacy server-rendered screens as well as modern component-based frontends; Monitoring fluency. You use Grafana or equivalent to investigate behaviour and define quality signals, rather than waiting for someone to hand you a dashboard; Practical AI in engineering workflows. Real experience with agentic AI, MCPs, agent skills, or building and using AI test harnesses — with the critical judgment to know when the output is wrong; Infrastructure foundations: containerisation (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, cloud ecosystems (GCP preferred), and comfort reading code in a polyglot stack (Java, Go, TypeScript); Champion of quality: a track record of owning the quality standard for a product area and holding the line on it; Structured problem framing. You clarify an ambiguous problem and map its upstream and downstream effects before proposing a solution — and you can point to a time when reframing the question changed what you did; Judgment without full information. You can describe how you stress-test a recommendation, a report or a generated output, and how you decide to act anyway when certainty isn't available; Self-directed learning. You will ramp across a legacy frontend stack, a real-time backend service and a large analytical warehouse. We are looking for a learning method, not a course list; Excellent communication and influence — you will be the only quality specialist in the room and must persuade rather than instruct, and share what you learn outward rather than hoarding it.

Nice to have

Ad tech, programmatic, affiliate or marketplace domain experience — campaigns, placements, targeting, fill rate, attribution; Experience testing a high-throughput, low-latency serving service (Go preferred) and its caching layers; Performance and load testing of a real-time decisioning path; Experience leading a test framework migration; Familiarity with OWASP guidelines and security testing tools; Interest in SRE principles and production ownership; Experience testing AI/LLM-driven product features.

Benefits

Responsible PTO policy; Up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year with additional dependent coverage; Monthly gym reimbursement policy; Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of total compensation with 3-year vesting schedule; Free Coursera subscription; PXA courses; 26 weeks fully paid parental leave for primary caregiver; 13 weeks fully paid leave for secondary caregiver; Technology stipend for home office setup; Monthly allowance to cover internet expenses.