Senior QA Engineer (Platform)

• Altruist is in the midst of an exceptional growth phase and we’re excited to hire a Senior QA Engineer to join our growing Platform team
• The Platform team builds the shared backend services and infrastructure that every product team at Altruist depends on
• That makes quality here a different problem: there is rarely a screen to click through, the consumers of what you test are other engineering teams, and a defect that escapes doesn’t affect one feature — it affects everything built on top of it
• In this role you’ll own quality for distributed backend services, working at the API, contract, event, and data layers
• You’ll build durable automation that gives product teams confidence to move quickly, and you’ll partner with Platform engineers to make services testable by design rather than verified after the fact
• This is a hands-on role for someone who is genuinely comfortable in the backend and wants their testing to have leverage across the whole organization
• Own end-to-end functional testing for Platform services across API, event, and database layers
• Design and validate contracts between services, catching breaking changes before downstream product teams ever see them
• Build and maintain test automation frameworks in Java using REST Assured and Postman for API coverage, extending to Playwright or Selenium where Platform capabilities surface in the UI
• Write SQL and data validation to verify that API behavior, event streams, and persisted state actually agree
• Verify security fixes and cover the authentication/authorization paths
• Detect configuration drift across environments
• Test asynchronous and event-driven flows, including retries, idempotency, ordering, and failure recovery
• Integrate automated test suites into GitLab CI/CD pipelines so failures surface early and reliably
• Assess blast radius for Platform changes and define the regression scope that shared services require
• Partner with Platform engineers to build testability into services from design onward
• Use Jira to manage test cases, track defects, and support efficient agile workflows
• Leverage AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor to accelerate test script development, generate test data, and improve defect triage and reporting
• Identify quality gaps in processes and systems and champion continuous improvement across the testing function

Benefits

• Grow your career: Altruist is a thoughtful, fast-growing company that values high achievers
• Our success is your success: Be rewarded for doing great work - competitive compensation and equity for all team members
• Take care of yourself: Health, dental, and vision coverage, available on your first day
• You’re welcome here: Altruist is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We’re committed to inclusivity
• Work-life integration: We work hard and respect everyone’s whole selves- Hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated regression coverage
• Experience working in agile environments with a regular release cadence
• Ownership - Takes accountability for product quality end to end and proactively drives testing strategy, execution, and follow-through
• Education - B.A. / B.S. in Computer Science or a related field
• Creative problem solving - Finds practical, scalable solutions to quality challenges and uses both exploratory thinking and automation to improve outcomes
• Experience testing microservices and distributed systems, where failures cross service boundaries
• Resilience - Thrives in a fast-paced environment, adapts to changing priorities, and maintains a high bar for quality under pressure
• Experience building, maintaining, and executing test plans in partnership with cross-functional teams
• Technical aptitude - Proficiency with SQL and comfort validating data directly in the database; proficiency with Java or another object-oriented language; hands-on experience building API automation with REST Assured and Postman; able to get up to speed on modern backend stacks (Spring Boot, Postgres, Kubernetes, Kafka, Temporal, Snowflake)
• Superb communication - Communicates clearly with engineers, product managers, and cross-functional stakeholders to clarify requirements, surface risks, and drive alignment.
• Strong hands-on experience testing backend services and APIs, with a demonstrated ability to uncover meaningful defects through exploratory and contract-level testing
• Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Altruist we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles
• Assurance - Brings sound judgment and confidence to testing decisions, defect triage, and release readiness recommendations
• Experience - 5+ years of experience as a QA Engineer or Software Test Engineer, ideally within a B2B financial services, fintech, or SaaS organization
• Experience testing AI-powered applications, including chatbots, assistants, or other LLM- or ML-based systems
• Practiced Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, pipelines in GitLab a plus
• Familiarity with tooling such as Kafka, Debezium, Temporal, and OpenTelemetry
• Experience testing behind feature flags and reasoning about coverage across flag states
• Performance or load testing experience against backend services
• Knowledge of brokerage platforms and financial services industry, including margin, options, account types, and trade lifecycle
• Familiarity with data encryption methodologies focused on PII