QA Architect

Nestdigital; Ernakulam; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 5,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Nestdigital is seeking a Quality Engineering Architect with 10–15 years of experience to define and drive the enterprise Quality Engineering strategy across banking and payment platforms. The role focuses on scalable test architectures, automation frameworks, API and contract testing standards, and CI/CD quality gates to ensure compliant, resilient software delivery.

The position requires hands-on leadership, mentoring teams, and active contribution to automation framework development, including

Qualifications

• 10–15 years of experience in Quality Engineering, Test Architecture, or QA Automation with ownership of enterprise strategy.
• Experience designing scalable automation frameworks and reusable platforms.
• Experience implementing end-to-end traceability and audit-ready release evidence.
• Strong understanding of quality governance, risk-based testing, defect prevention, and release quality management.

Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise Quality Engineering roadmap and define testing standards, frameworks, governance models, and engineering best practices.
• Lead scheme conformance and regulatory compliance testing for Banking Payments and ISO 20022-based integrations.
• Design and build API-first and contract-first automation frameworks using Karate, Pact, Specmatic, WireMock, Rest Assured, or equivalent.
• Drive workflow-level testing for orchestration platforms and their replay validation, determinism, compensation, and idempotency.
• Establish testing strategies for event-driven, asynchronous, and distributed payment workflows.
• Define test data management strategies for regulated environments, including synthetic data generation, masking, and privacy-safe provisioning.
• Implement release evidence automation and end-to-end traceability to support audit readiness and regulatory compliance.
• Define security testing practices and integrate DevSecOps quality controls within CI/CD pipelines.
• Define performance, scalability, resilience, and reliability testing strategies for production-scale payment systems.
• Integrate automated quality gates into CI/CD pipelines and establish release readiness criteria.
• Drive AI-assisted Quality Engineering through intelligent test generation, regression optimization, self-healing automation, flaky test detection, and change-impact-based test selection.
• Evaluate emerging Quality Engineering technologies and continuously improve engineering practices.
• Mentor Quality Engineers and provide technical leadership across automation, API testing, workflow validation, compliance testing, and engineering excellence.

Skills

Quality Engineering Architecture

API testing

Contract testing

Banking Payments ISO20022

Automation framework design

CI/CD & DevSecOps

AI-assisted testing

Leadership & mentoring

Agile/DevOps

Tools

Karate

Pact

Specmatic

WireMock

Rest Assured

Playwright

Testcontainers

JMeter

Gatling

Job description

Job Description – Quality Engineering Architect (QA Architect)

Primary Skills

Quality Engineering Architecture, API & Contract Testing, Banking Payments (ISO 20022), Automation Framework Development, Performance & Resilience Testing, Security Testing, AI-assisted Test Automation, Test Strategy, Software Quality Management, Technical Leadership

Experience: 10–15 Years

Role Summary

• The Quality Engineering Architect will define and drive the enterprise Quality Engineering strategy across banking and payment platforms. This role is responsible for designing scalable test architectures, automation frameworks, API and contract testing standards, workflow-level validation, performance and security testing practices, AI-enabled Quality Engineering capabilities, and CI/CD quality gates to ensure high-quality, resilient, compliant, and scalable software delivery.

With a strong focus on regulated Banking and Financial Services environments, the role emphasizes scheme conformance, ISO 20022 alignment, audit-ready compliance evidence, and engineering excellence.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. The architect is expected to actively contribute to automation framework development, write production-quality code, mentor engineering teams, and drive enterprise-wide Quality Engineering transformation — not operate solely in a governance capacity.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the enterprise Quality Engineering roadmap and define testing standards, frameworks, governance models, and engineering best practices.
• Lead scheme conformance and regulatory compliance testing for Banking Payments and ISO 20022-based integrations.
• Design and build API-first and contract-first automation frameworks using tools such as Karate, Pact, Specmatic, WireMock, Rest Assured, or equivalent.
• Drive workflow-level testing for orchestration platforms (Temporal, Camunda, Conductor, or equivalent), covering replay validation, determinism, compensation, and idempotency.
• Establish testing strategies for event-driven, asynchronous, and distributed payment workflows.
• Design and maintain container-based integration testing environments using Testcontainers or equivalent technologies.
• Define test data management strategies for regulated environments, including synthetic data generation, masking, and privacy-safe provisioning.
• Implement release evidence automation and end-to-end traceability (Requirements → Test Cases → Executions → Defects) to support audit readiness and regulatory compliance.
• Define security testing practices and integrate DevSecOps quality controls within CI/CD pipelines.
• Define performance, scalability, resilience, and reliability testing strategies for production-scale payment systems.
• Integrate automated quality gates into CI/CD pipelines and establish release readiness criteria.
• Drive AI-assisted Quality Engineering by leveraging intelligent test generation, regression optimization, self-healing automation, flaky test detection, and change-impact-based test selection.
• Evaluate emerging Quality Engineering technologies and continuously improve engineering practices across the organization.
• Mentor Quality Engineers and provide technical leadership across automation, API testing, workflow validation, compliance testing, and engineering excellence.
• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Architecture, DevOps, Security, and Business teams to embed quality throughout the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)..

Must-Have Skills

Quality Engineering & Architecture

• 10–15 years of experience in Quality Engineering, Test Architecture, or QA Automation with demonstrated ownership of enterprise Quality Engineering strategy.
• Experience designing scalable automation frameworks and reusable Quality Engineering platforms.
• Experience implementing end-to-end traceability and producing audit-ready release evidence.
• Strong understanding of quality governance, risk-based testing, defect prevention, and release quality management.

Automation & Testing

• Strong expertise in API testing, API automation, and contract testing, with hands-on experience in tools such as Karate, Pact, Specmatic, WireMock, Rest Assured, or equivalent.
• Experience with Playwright or equivalent modern automation frameworks.
• Strong understanding of microservices, distributed systems, and event-driven/asynchronous architectures, including experience testing workflow orchestration platforms (Temporal, Camunda, Conductor, or equivalent) for replay, determinism, compensation, and idempotency.
• Experience with Testcontainers or equivalent container-based integration testing approaches.
• Experience defining and executing performance, scalability, resilience, and load testing using JMeter, Gatling, or equivalent tools.
• Experience with security testing methodologies, DevSecOps practices, and strong SQL/database validation skills..

Banking & Payments

• Strong experience in Banking Payments, payment processing platforms, or transaction processing systems.
• Exposure to ISO 20022 message standards and scheme conformance testing is strongly preferred.
• Good understanding of transaction lifecycle, reconciliation, settlement, and regulatory compliance testing.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab, or equivalent platforms.
• Working knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, containerized applications, and cloud-native testing.
• Experience managing test data in regulated environments using synthetic data generation, masking, and secure provisioning.
• Strong hands-on programming experience in C#/.NET (preferred) or Java using xUnit/NUnit, JUnit, or equivalent testing frameworks.
• Candidates must actively contribute to automation framework development and demonstrate coding proficiency during the technical assessment.
• Experience working in Agile, DevOps, and regulated software delivery environments.

AI-enabled Quality Engineering

• Experience leveraging AI-assisted testing tools to improve software quality and engineering productivity.
• Experience with intelligent test generation, regression optimization, self-healing automation, flaky-test detection, change-impact analysis, and AI-assisted test maintenance.

Leadership

• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Proven ability to mentor, coach, and build high-performing Quality Engineering teams.
• Experience driving engineering excellence across multiple products, platforms, and delivery teams.

Good-to-Have Skills

• Accessibility testing.
• Service virtualization and advanced contract testing practices.
• Mobile automation testing.
• ISTQB Advanced Test Architect (or equivalent) certification.

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