QA Chapter Lead

What You Will Own

As embedded QA engineer in your squad

• Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, retrospective. QA is in the room from the start, not brought in at the end.
  
• Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint. Stories without clear acceptance criteria do not enter the sprint.
  
• Write and maintain automated test suites for your squad's domain - unit, integration, E2E as appropriate. Test coverage is your responsibility.
  
• Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate - nothing ships without passing the criteria you have defined and maintained.
  

As QA Chapter Lead across your function

• Define and maintain QA standards for the function: test pyramid structure, automation tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds, and CI gate configuration.
  
• Onboard new QA engineers into the chapter - they join a squad, but they join your standards. Define the onboarding process and the baseline expectations.
  
• Run the monthly QA Guild with the counterpart Chapter Lead from the other engineering function. Alignment on tooling, shared frameworks, and Definition of Done consistency across the full engineering organization.
  
• Own the automation framework selection and evolution - evaluate new tooling, deprecate old, and maintain documentation that any QA engineer can follow.
  
• Report to the Head of Engineering on QA chapter health: coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlog, and any systemic quality issues.
  

Who You Are

Essential

• 5+ years of software QA experience with at least 2 years in a Lead QA role where you drove test strategy across more than one team.
  
• Strong automation engineering skills - you write test code to a production standard. Your test suites are maintainable, readable, and run reliably in CI.
  
• Experience with API testing at depth: REST, contract testing, integration test design. Most of Watu's QA surface area is backend and API-level.
  
• Experience defining and maintaining QA standards in an Agile squad environment - not as a gatekeeper at the end of a sprint, but as an embedded contributor from day one.
  
• Experience in Java-based backend environments - you can read Java code, understand the architecture, and write tests that reflect it accurately.
  

Strongly preferred

• Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services - you understand what it means to test systems that move money.
  
• Experience with performance and load testing - understanding payment rail throughput, API concurrency limits, and how to surface them before production does.
  
• Mobile app testing experience is mandatory for one of the QA Chapter roles (Android surface).
  
• Experience building or evolving a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice across multiple teams.
  
• Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling - test case generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs.
  

What You Will Own

As embedded QA engineer in your squad

• Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, retrospective. QA is in the room from the start, not brought in at the end.
  
• Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint. Stories without clear acceptance criteria do not enter the sprint.
  
• Write and maintain automated test suites for your squad's domain - unit, integration, E2E as appropriate. Test coverage is your responsibility.
  
• Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate - nothing ships without passing the criteria you have defined and maintained.
  

As QA Chapter Lead across your function

• Define and maintain QA standards for the function: test pyramid structure, automation tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds, and CI gate configuration.
  
• Onboard new QA engineers into the chapter - they join a squad, but they join your standards. Define the onboarding process and the baseline expectations.
  
• Run the monthly QA Guild with the counterpart Chapter Lead from the other engineering function. Alignment on tooling, shared frameworks, and Definition of Done consistency across the full engineering organization.
  
• Own the automation framework selection and evolution - evaluate new tooling, deprecate old, and maintain documentation that any QA engineer can follow.
  
• Report to the Head of Engineering on QA chapter health: coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlog, and any systemic quality issues.
  

Who You Are

Essential

• 5+ years of software QA experience with at least 2 years in a Lead QA role where you drove test strategy across more than one team.
  
• Strong automation engineering skills - you write test code to a production standard. Your test suites are maintainable, readable, and run reliably in CI.
  
• Experience with API testing at depth: REST, contract testing, integration test design. Most of Watu's QA surface area is backend and API-level.
  
• Experience defining and maintaining QA standards in an Agile squad environment - not as a gatekeeper at the end of a sprint, but as an embedded contributor from day one.
  
• Experience in Java-based backend environments - you can read Java code, understand the architecture, and write tests that reflect it accurately.
  

Strongly preferred

• Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services - you understand what it means to test systems that move money.
  
• Experience with performance and load testing - understanding payment rail throughput, API concurrency limits, and how to surface them before production does.
  
• Mobile app testing experience is mandatory for one of the QA Chapter roles (Android surface).
  
• Experience building or evolving a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice across multiple teams.
  
• Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling - test case generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs.