Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS

WFP celebrates and embraces diversity. It is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all its employees and encourages qualified candidates to apply irrespective of race, colour, national origin, ethnic or social background, genetic information, gender, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, religion or belief, HIV status or disability.

ABOUT WFP

The World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability and prosperity, for people recovering from conflict, disasters and the impact of climate change.

At WFP, people are at the heart of everything we do and the vision of the future WFP workforce is one of diverse, committed, skilled, and high performing teams, selected on merit, operating in a healthy and inclusive work environment, living WFP's values (Integrity, Collaboration, Commitment, Humanity, and Inclusion) and working with partners to save and change the lives of those WFP serves.

To learn more about WFP, visit our website: https://www.wfp.org and follow us on social media to keep up with our latest news: YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok.

WHY JOIN WFP? 

• WFP is a 2020 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

• WFP offers a highly inclusive, diverse, and multicultural working environment.

• WFP invests in the personal & professional development of its employees through a range of training, accreditation, coaching, mentorship, and other programs as well as through internal mobility opportunities.

• A career path in WFP provides an exciting opportunity to work across the various country, regional and global offices around the world, and with passionate colleagues who work tirelessly to ensure that effective humanitarian assistance reaches millions of people across the globe.

• We offer an attractive compensation package (please refer to the Terms and Conditions section of this vacancy announcement).

POSITION TITLE:  Individual Giving – Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

TYPE OF CONTRACT: Regular Consultant

ORG UNIT:  Private Sector Partnerships (PSP)                                        

DUTY STATION: Rome HQ / Remote                                

DURATION:  11 months                                  

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is the world’s largest humanitarian agency working to create a world with zero hunger. WFP and its partners believe that no child should go to bed hungry and that individual and collective wellbeing can only be achieved if all children, women and men get the nutritious food they need to lead healthy, dignified lives. Each year, WFP assists 90 million people in 83 countries. Every day, some 5,600 WFP-chartered trucks are on the road, 92 planes are in the air and 20 ships are at sea. These numbers speak to WFP’s unparalleled reputation as an emergency responder, one that is often the first on the scene in the most difficult environments. WFP also works with partners to strengthen the resilience of communities most vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition through long-term development programmes aimed at boosting food security, local economies, education, employment and gender equality. While hunger and malnutrition are the world’s largest solvable issues, the needs are still immense and growing. 821 million people in the world suffer from chronic hunger.

The Private Partnerships Division (PSP) is responsible for working with the private sector to achieve greater impact in WFP’s work. PSP has embarked on an exceptionally ambitious new strategy to raise an additional one 1.3 dollars for hungry or malnourished people in the next five years and to expand the contribution to WFP from the business sector through effective and sustainable long-term partnerships as well as from private individual supporters around the world. This includes securing new high impact technical partnerships, signing significant new corporate deals and growing existing relationships as well as building a base of one million individual supporters.

INDIVIDUAL FUNDRAISING

WFP operates one of the fastest-growing global individual fundraising programmes in the humanitarian sector. Initially launched as a lean, digital-focused initiative, the programme has evolved into a major strategic driver of income growth, with an ambition to raise USD 1.3 billion annually by 2030.

The programme has transitioned from a purely digital model to a digital-first, multi-channel approach. While the centralised global team continues to acquire supporters through core digital channels (Meta and Search), it is rapidly scaling additional acquisition channels such as Face-to-Face, Direct TV, Telemarketing, and Direct Mail. This diversification is essential to sustaining growth and strengthening donor lifetime value, but it also introduces increased operational, regulatory, and contractual complexity.

At the same time, the programme is shifting from a largely Western-market focus to a more g-local model. Now operating in seven languages, it enables more locally relevant engagement and is expanding into high-potential strategic markets including Korea, China, Italy, and the Middle East. This expansion requires robust governance frameworks, strong understanding of fundraising regulations, and effective management of contracts with external partners and vendors.

Supporter engagement is delivered through an integrated, multi-channel loyalty ecosystem—including email, SMS, WhatsApp, outbound telephony, and Meta—ensuring a high-quality donor experience that drives long-term engagement and impact.

As Individual Giving is becoming an increasingly important funding source for WFP, this impacts how IG technology is built, run and managed across markets, channels and products. Whilst before our fundraising strategy focused only on digital, we are now required to implement a multi-channel program covering Digital, Face2Facem Telemarketing, DRTV, Direct Mail, Legacy, Gifts etc. Our delivery moves from a centralised hub to a centralised government with a federated execution. Our markets are also shift from fewer and simple to high return prioritization with broader and more complex needs whilst pushing g-localization due to regulatory and vendor requirements. Our volumes also scale up, from lower to higher and multi-source. And finally also the operation expectation changes, from a start-up to a business critical function providing a sustainable form of income for the organization and the people we serve.

 PURPOSE OF THE ASSIGNMENT 

The Senior Quality Assurance Engineer – Systems & Integrations will play a pivotal role in strengthening WFP’s end‑to‑end quality assurance capability across the entire Individual Giving (IG) technology ecosystem. Operating within the IG Tech & Operations team and aligned with the Strategic Delivery Hub, the incumbent will be responsible for ensuring that changes delivered across platforms—including GoDonate, Salesforce NPC/NPSP, Marketing Cloud, payment systems, integrations, and data flows—are reliable, safe to release, and validated against defined acceptance and risk criteria.

This role fills the capability gap between our emerging QA function (currently focused on GoDonate) and the system‑wide release confidence required to operate a scaled, multi‑platform fundraising environment. The Senior QA Engineer will establish cross‑platform testing standards, lead regression and integration testing efforts, drive systemic defect analysis, and ensure that validation covers full supporter, operational, and reporting flows. The incumbent will work closely with the Technical Lead, Data Engineer, Fundraising Architect, Product Lead, and Project Manager to ensure that all workstreams are tested coherently, sustainably, and within the parameters defined by the Strategic Delivery Hub’s delivery architecture.

The role operates as an independent quality authority (within the constraints set by the Hub), complementing junior QA capacity and strengthening WFP’s ability to deliver high‑quality, low‑risk changes across a growing, complex ecosystem.

QA processes and controls should remain proportionate to delivery risk and support delivery confidence without creating unnecessary operational overhead.

ACCOUNTABILITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES:

1. System‑Level QA Strategy & Standards

• Own the definition, evolution, and implementation of system‑level QA standards across the entire IG fundraising platform, ensuring coherence across GoDonate, Salesforce, integrations, data pipelines, and external vendor systems.
• Define and maintain what “safe to release” means for multi‑platform changes, including required test coverage, regression depth, validation gates, and acceptance evidence.
• Establish cross‑system regression testing strategy, including high‑risk change protocols and standards for test coverage.

2. Cross‑Platform Testing & Release Readiness

• Lead end‑to‑end validation for cross‑system flows (e.g., donation → Salesforce → data warehouse → reporting), ensuring correctness across all layers of the ecosystem.
• Conduct structured release readiness reviews, consolidating evidence from functional, integration, regression, and data validation tests.
• Provide independent, evidence‑based recommendations on release safety, escalating systemic risks to the Strategic Delivery Hub when required.

3. Integration & Data Flow Quality

• Partner with Integration Engineer and Data Engineer to verify that pipelines, APIs, automations, attribution inputs, and cross‑platform synchronisation behave as intended in both test and production‑like environments.
• Validate that changes in one system do not create regressions in adjacent donor, operational, or reporting flows.
• Lead root‑cause analysis for complex, multi‑system defects and ensure systemic fixes are prioritised appropriately.

4. Test Execution, Evidence & Documentation

• Design, maintain, and execute detailed test suites across platforms—including functional, integration, regression, negative path, and data validation tests.
• Produce structured, traceable test evidence required for release gating and auditability.
• Define reusable testing patterns, templates, and documentation standards to uplift QA maturity across all spokes.

5. Capability Leadership & Mentoring

• Guide and mentor the emerging Junior QA function (currently focused on GoDonate), ensuring that targeted regression and defect validation activities are carried out effectively and in alignment with system‑wide QA strategy.
• Uplift broader QA capability by contributing to improvements in automation strategy, documentation, tooling, and test environment usage.
• Embed QA best practices into workstreams and foster consistent quality culture across IG Tech & Ops and vendor partners.

6. Risk Identification, Monitoring & Escalation

• Identify systemic failure modes and recurring defect patterns, feeding insights back into architectural, delivery, and product decisions.
• Escalate unresolved platform‑level risks to the Strategic Delivery Hub, ensuring visibility and decision‑making support for cross‑initiative issues.
• Help prevent QA fragmentation or siloing within product areas by maintaining a unified, platform‑wide approach.

7. Collaboration & Alignment with Strategic Delivery Hub

• Work closely with Technical Architecture, Fundraising Architecture, Product, and Delivery roles to ensure test planning is consistent with architectural constraints and delivery sequencing.
• Contribute QA inputs into validation gates, structural decisions, and sequencing discussions.
• Support decision‑making with evidence derived from structured testing, systemic risk analysis, and cross-platform validation results.

8. Other

• Perform other quality‑related duties as required to support the evolution, reliability, and scalability of the Individual Giving technology ecosystem.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

Knowledge & Skills

University degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, STEM discipline, or equivalent practical experience. 

• Minimum 5 years of professional experience in quality assurance, system testing, technical delivery, or platform engineering within complex technology environments. 

• Preference will be given to candidates with experience working across integrated multi-platform ecosystems involving CRM, payments, marketing platforms, APIs, data flows or operational systems. 

• Experience designing and executing structured testing across multiple systems, including integration testing, regression testing, end-to-end validation and release readiness.
• Strong understanding of how changes propagate across interconnected systems including impact on operational, donor-facing and reporting. 
• Experience working with modern web applications, APIs, data pipelines and cloud platforms.
• Experience working with testing tools, automation and release processes.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, including the ability to investigate complex multi-system defects and interactions, and identify systemic failure patterns and root causes.
• Experience working in agile and iterative delivery environments involving multiple parallel workstreams and conflicting and changing priorities.
• Ability to balance delivery pragmatism with appropriate discipline releases and management of risk.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, particularly the ability to work across technical, operational, non-technical and cross cultural stakeholders.
• Structured and methodical, with good organisational and documentation skills.
• Flexible and adaptable, with the ability to work across evolving technologies, platforms, delivery models and project streams.
• Familiarity with Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, payment platforms, data warehouses, and fundraising technologies would be advantageous.

Languages

• Excellent written and spoken English is required
• Knowledge of another official UN language would be a plus.

WFP LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK

WFP Leadership Framework guides to the common standards of behavior that guide HOW we work together to accomplish our mission.

Click here to access WFP Leadership Framework

REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION

WFP is committed to supporting individuals with disabilities by providing reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process. If you require a reasonable accommodation, please contact:  global.inclusion@wfp.org

NO FEE DISCLAIMER

The United Nations does not charge any application, processing, training, interviewing, testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Should you receive a solicitation for the payment of a fee, please disregard it. Furthermore, please note that emblems, logos, names and addresses are easily copied and reproduced. Therefore, you are advised to apply particular care when submitting personal information on the web.

REMINDERS BEFORE YOU SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION

• All applications must be submitted exclusively through our online recruiting system. We do not consider CVs or applications sent by email, LinkedIn, or any other channel.

• We strongly recommend that your Workday profile is accurate and complete, and that all sections are filled in, including your employment history, academic qualifications, language skills, and UN grade (if applicable). Once your profile is completed, please apply, and submit your application.

• If you experience technical issues while submitting your application, you may contact us at global.hrerecruitment@wfp.org. Please note that this email is only for technical issues with an application - unsolicited applications or documents sent to this inbox will not receive a reply.

• At the application stage, the only required documents are your CV and Cover Letter. Additional documents (passport, certificates, recommendation letters, etc.) may be requested later in the process.

• Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and invited to proceed to the next stage of the recruitment process.

All employment decisions are made on the basis of organizational needs, job requirements, merit, and individual qualifications. WFP is committed to providing an inclusive work environment free of sexual exploitation and abuse, all forms of discrimination, any kind of harassment, sexual harassment, and abuse of authority. Therefore, all selected candidates will undergo rigorous reference and background checks.

No appointment under any kind of contract will be offered to members of the UN Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ), International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), FAO Finance Committee, WFP External Auditor, WFP Audit Committee, Joint Inspection Unit (JIU) and other similar bodies within the United Nations system with oversight responsibilities over WFP, both during their service and within three years of ceasing that service.