Senior QA Engineer

Senior QA Engineer

Watu  ·  Technology Organisation  ·  Reports to Tech Lead

About Watu

Watu is a fintech company operating across Africa and Latin America, providing device financing and financial services to customers historically excluded from the formal financial system. We finance motorcycles, smartphones and other productive assets through a technology-first, data-driven approach - enabling customers to own income-generating assets and build credit histories.

Our platform supports millions of customer journeys across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and beyond, with continued expansion into LATAM.

The Role

As a Senior QA Engineer at Watu, you are embedded in a squad - the senior technical authority on quality within it. You do everything a QA Engineer does - ceremonies, acceptance criteria, automated test suites, the Definition of Done - but you also own the harder problems: test architecture, performance and load testing, contract testing, and the squad's most complex integration surfaces.

You report to your squad's Tech Lead for day-to-day work. For QA standards and tooling, you sit in the QA Chapter led by the QA Chapter Lead, who reports to the Head of Engineering. You are the natural deputy to the QA Chapter Lead - representing your squad in the QA Guild when needed, mentoring QA Engineers across the chapter, and often owning a specific chapter-wide initiative (a framework, a tooling migration, a testing discipline) end to end.

This is a senior individual-contributor role, not a management role. You lead through technical depth and example, not through authority over other QA engineers' day-to-day work.

What You Will Do

• Attend all squad ceremonies - sprint planning, daily standup, review, retrospective - as a full member of the squad, not a downstream recipient of work.
• Define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner before each sprint, and push back on ambiguity before development starts, not after.
• Own test architecture for your squad's domain - the structure of the test pyramid, how unit, integration, contract, and E2E tests fit together, and where the squad's coverage gaps are.
• Lead performance and load testing for your squad - establishing baselines, identifying throughput and concurrency limits, and surfacing risk before it reaches production.
• Own the squad's Definition of Done quality gate, and act as the final internal check before anything ships to staging or production.
• Mentor QA Engineers in your squad and across the chapter - reviewing their test design, raising the bar on automation quality, and helping them grow into the standards the Chapter Lead sets.
• Deputise for the QA Chapter Lead where needed - representing your squad's QA practice in the monthly QA Guild, and contributing directly to chapter-wide standards, tooling decisions, and onboarding material.
• Own a chapter-level initiative - for example, the contract-testing framework, the performance-testing toolkit, or AI-assisted test generation - evaluating, implementing, and documenting it for the whole function.
• Triage the squad's hardest test failures - distinguishing flaky tests from real regressions in complex, high-traffic, or high-risk areas of the system.
• Use AI/LLM tooling actively: test case generation, synthetic test data, regression triage, and documentation are all areas where AI accelerates QA work.

Who You Are

Essential

• 5+ years of QA engineering experience in a software product environment, with a track record of owning test strategy for a complex domain, not just executing within it.
• Strong automation engineering skills - you write test code to a production standard, in Java, Python, or JavaScript, and your suites are maintainable, readable, and stable in CI.
• API testing depth - REST API testing, contract testing, integration test design, HTTP semantics, and JSON schema validation.
• Experience with performance and load testing - you can design and run load tests, interpret throughput and concurrency results, and translate them into engineering action.
• Comfortable operating without a QA manager above you, and confident enough in your technical judgement to mentor others and represent QA practice beyond your own squad.
• 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 the stakes of testing systems that move money.
• Experience with contract testing (Pact or equivalent) in a microservices environment.
• Mobile app testing experience - Android in particular, whether automation (Espresso, Appium) or structured manual testing with a regression framework.
• Experience mentoring other QA engineers, running internal training, or contributing to a QA chapter, guild, or community of practice.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling - test case generation, regression triage, and synthetic test data creation using LLMs.

How to Apply

Send your CV and a brief note on why this role to the Watu talent team. We run a structured process: an initial conversation with the relevant Head of Engineering, a technical interview, and a final conversation with the wider leadership team. We move quickly for the right candidate.

We are an equal opportunity employer and actively work to build a team that reflects the diversity of the markets we serve.

All personal information provided will be processed in accordance with applicable data protection laws and regulations and used solely for recruitment and selection purposes.  

Watu  ·  Technology Organisation  ·  Senior QA Engineer