Software Quality Engineer (Freelance Contract)

Job Description:

Responsibilities:

• Code and Review: Continuously code, read, analyze, design, and optimize front-end, back-end, and integration code across Merkle's proprietary products and solutions throughout the development lifecycle: assessing technical design, implementation quality, identifying technical risk areas, and pinpointing the right scope for testing.
• Product Ownership: Act as Product Owner for Merkle's proprietary innovation products: defining and prioritizing the product backlog, aligning roadmap decisions with business stakeholders, and ensuring features are delivered in line with business goals and user needs.
• Test Strategy, Automation & CI/CD: Partner with business stakeholders to translate requirements into test plans, cases, and automation frameworks for web apps and APIs covering functional, non-functional test scenarios, integrating them into CI/CD pipelines for early defect detection. Perform manual or exploratory testing for complex workflows and new features as needed.
• Agile Collaboration: Participate actively in Sprint planning, daily stand-ups, and retrospectives, advocating for software quality best practices from the early design stages (Shift-Left approach).

Qualifications:

• 4+ years of professional experience in software engineering / test automation, with strong working knowledge of full-stack application development (front-end and back-end) sufficient to analysing code and assess technical risk.
• Strong proficiency with modern automation frameworks and tools such as Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Robot Framework, or Appium.
• Solid foundational knowledge in programming/scripting languages used for testing, preferably JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or Go.
• Extensive experience with backend API testing utilizing tools like Postman, SoapUI, or RestAssured.
• Competency in writing SQL queries to manipulate and verify backend data structures.
• Experienced with core development tools and project management platforms, such as Git, Jira, YouTrack, and Asana.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Experience executing performance, load, or stress testing using tools like JMeter or k6 is a plus.
• Familiarity with containerized execution environments (e.g., Docker) and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) is a plus.
• Prior experience as a QE working closely alongside full-stack development teams, ideally within MarTech, AdTech, or data-driven product environments is preferred.
• Professional QA/QE certifications, such as ISTQB (Certified Tester Foundation or Advanced Level) is a plus.

Location:

Brand:

Time Type:

Contract Type: