Senior QA Automation Engineer

Senior QA Automation Engineer

Location:India| Work Mode:On-site

Employment Type:Full-time| Reports To:Engineering Manager

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Workpay is one of Africa's fastest-growing payroll solutions providers, helping global businesses hire, manage, and pay employees efficiently, legally, and compliantly across the continent. Our payroll, compliance, and workforce financial services platform simplifies payroll, compliance, benefits, and workforce administration, enabling organizations to focus on growth while ensuring employees are paid accurately and on time.

Backed by leading global investors such as Visa, Norrsken22, Y Combinator, Acadian Ventures, Google for Startups, and Verod-Kepple, Workpay supports businesses operating in 30+ African countries. As we continue to expand our footprint across Africa and beyond, building the right team across markets is critical to sustaining our growth.

ROLE OVERVIEW

As a Senior QA Engineer, you will be the technical anchor for our quality engineering ecosystem. This is a high-leverage role focused on building scalable test automation architectures, provisioning resilient test infrastructure, and solving bottlenecks that emerge as our test suites and engineering teams expand.

You will balance a deep “think like an end-user” product mindset with the technical capability to “code like a developer.” Beyond framework architecture, you will troubleshoot complex backend flows, analyze regression impacts, and mentor junior engineers to champion a culture of technical excellence across the organization. The role will report to the Engineering Manager.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• Core Framework Architecture: Design, build, and scale modular test automation frameworks from scratch across UI (Web) and API/microservices layers to support rapid product iteration.
• Backend & Async Troubleshooting: Validate complex data flows across synchronous and asynchronous architectures (REST APIs, GraphQL, Kafka, RabbitMQ) to isolate root causes.
• Impact & Regression Analysis: Conduct rigorous structural impact analysis on code changes to map system dependencies, ensuring product quality is maintained with zero regression impact.
• Customer Triage & Solutions: Lead the technical triaging of complex, escalated customer issues, diving into system logs and databases to propose structural solutions.
• Performance & Load Testing: Design and execute scalable load, stress, and endurance test suites (using k6, JMeter, or Gatling) to uncover architectural bottlenecks and guarantee system reliability under peak traffic.
• Test Infrastructure & Scale: Provision, configure, and maintain robust distributed test environments using containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) to enable seamless, parallel test execution.
• Pipeline Monitoring & Reliability: Implement telemetry, health dashboards, and alerting for test infrastructure and CI/CD runs to proactively eliminate flaky tests and pipeline slowdowns.
• Mentorship & Technical Leadership: Guide and upskill junior QA engineers through structured code reviews, architectural guidance, paired programming, and test design workshops.
• Shift-Left Quality Advocacy: Collaborate directly with backend and DevOps engineers during system design phases to ensure service testability and observability.

EXPERIENCE

• Core Programming: Advanced proficiency in at least one modern language (e.g., Go, Java, Python, or TypeScript).

• Test Frameworks: Deep experience building Web and API automation from the ground up using modern frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, RestAssured, or Karate).
• Distributed Systems & Event Validation: Proven experience validating message queues / event-driven pipelines (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) and debugging asynchronous workflows.
• Database Proficiency: Strong querying and diagnostic skills across both relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases.
• Performance Engineering: Hands-on experience designing and executing performance suites using tools like k6, JMeter, or Gatling.
• Infrastructure & Orchestration: Practical experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerized execution grids (e.g., Selenoid, Playwright Grid, or cloud farms).
• CI/CD & Observability: Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and monitoring tools (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus).

NICE TO HAVE

• Specialized Testing Domains: Familiarity with Security testing concepts (OWASP Top 10, vulnerability scanning), Accessibility testing standard practices (WCAG compliance, AXE, Screen readers), and Visual regression testing tools (Applitools, Percy).
• Prior experience building in-house test infrastructure platforms or developer-productivity tooling.
• Strong background in contract testing (e.g., Pact) and chaos/resilience testing patterns.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code) to accelerate boilerplate generation and documentation while maintaining high code integrity.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive, incentive-based remuneration, health cover, and gym membership.
• Purpose driven work. We are building the rails for employment payments and compliance across Africa, helping drive economic growth and development.
• Career advancement through constant opportunities for learning and growth.

• Working in a flexible, vibrant team environment.

Workpay is an equal-opportunity employer. We welcome applications from qualified candidates regardless of race, religion, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.