Senior Software Engineer

Very Good Security; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Stock options

401k with employer match

Life & disability insurance

Flexible work hours

Holiday and PTO

Job summary

Very Good Security is seeking a Sr Software Engineer, Payments Quality to champion quality across our high-throughput payments platform. You will design AI-assisted test strategies, implement automated regression suites, and drive performance testing to prevent downtime and latency spikes.

You will collaborate with feature teams, build emulators for external systems, and embed quality gates into CI/CD pipelines using modern tooling on cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience focusing on quality engineering, test automation framework design, and performance testing for complex systems.
• Experience with AI-enabled test tooling, synthetic data generation, or AI-assisted test pipelines is highly desirable.
• Domain knowledge in payments (3DS, tokenization, gateways) or security/compliance is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own the quality strategy for Payments Engineering, building automated guardrails into CI/CD pipelines.
• Develop and maintain AI-assisted test strategies covering end-to-end regression and high-concurrency load testing.
• Build emulators for external systems and partner integrations to ensure zero-downtime releases.
• Lead performance, stress, and latency testing to protect throughput during peak periods.
• Mentor engineers on quality engineering best practices and drive golden paths for automated testing.

Skills

Quality Engineering

Test Automation

Performance Testing

AI-assisted Testing

Security Testing

Payment Systems

Distributed Systems

Education

BA/BS degree

Tools

Jenkins

Docker

Kubernetes

GitHub Actions

Locust

JMeter

Gatling

k6

Job description

• As a Sr Software Engineer, Payments Quality, you will serve as a key technical practitioner and quality champion on our Payments Engineering team
• You will take ownership of setting, building, and enforcing world-class quality standards across our core payment systems
• In this role, you will write software for robust AI-assisted quality strategies covering end-to-end automated regression suites and high-concurrency performance and load testing
• Working closely with feature development engineers, Tech Leads, and Product Management, you will ensure our mission-critical, high-throughput payment platform and applications operate with zero downtime and flawless accuracy
• Rather than relying on manual QA or traditional top-down testing scripts, you will leverage AI-native engineering methodologies and integrate test automation across the entire SDLC
• You will also be building emulators for external systems, such as card networks and other partner integrations
• We are looking for hands-on builders who refuse to settle for the status quo, hate manual friction, and take immense pride in fortifying enterprise-grade financial systems for scalability, reliability, and security
• Architect and Embed Quality Benchmarks: Own the overarching quality strategy for Payments Acceptance, building automated guardrails so seamlessly into our pipelines that rigorous end-to-end validation happens automatically, without slowing down feature teams, accelerating release cycles
• Drive Performance & Stress Testing: Architect and execute high-concurrency load, stress, and latency testing to stress-test payment pipelines under extreme transaction volumes. You own the mission of ensuring our platform never drops transactions or degrades in latency during peak periods.
• Pioneer AI-Native Software Engineering focused on Quality: Actively integrate AI-assisted developer tools and agentic workflows into test creation, synthetic data generation, and automated edge-case analysis to multiply testing velocity. Build high performance emulators for external systems
• Deep Observability & Incident Prevention: Implement robust telemetry and telemetry-driven test environments using tools like Prometheus and Grafana to monitor system behavior under load, driving blameless post-mortems and proactive bug prevention
• Cross-Functional Velocity & Mentorship: Partner with feature teams to build “Golden Paths” for automated testing, ensuring engineers can validate code rapidly with high confidence. Mentor team members on quality engineering best practices

Benefits

• Competitive health benefits including medical, dental, & vision insurance
• VGS stock options
• 401k plan, with employer matching 4% and immediate vesting of employer match
• Life & disability insurance
• Pre-tax flexible spending accounts (dependent and healthcare FSA)
• Flexible work hours and flexible PTO
• 11 US company holidays
• Eligibility for health benefits starts on Day 1!
• New hire home office set up allowance
• Professional learning reimbursement

High-Agency Mindset: An innate drive to eliminate manual friction, proactively seek out edge cases, and acquire whatever missing domain context is needed to solve complex quality challenges end-to-end

CI/CD & Cloud-Native Toolchains: Direct experience embedding automated quality gates into modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitOps) within containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) on public clouds (AWS)

Automation & Scripting Mastery: Deep hands-on experience building automated test suites in Java, Python, Go, or TypeScript, with a strong command of REST API testing and microservices validation

Data & Messaging Validation: Experience testing event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS) and relational/NoSQL databases, ensuring data consistency and transactional integrity under load

Performance & Load Testing Depth: Proven track record designing and running performance, stress, and load tests at scale using tools like JMeter, Locust, Gatling, or k6

Ownership in Quality Engineering: 5+ years of software engineering experience focusing on quality engineering, test automation framework design, and performance testing for complex, high-throughput distributed systems

Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products

BA/BS degree

A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment

Domain expertise in 3DS, Network Tokens, Account Updater, or payment gateway integrations

Experience with AI developer tools, LLM-generated test automation pipelines, or synthetic test data generation

Practical knowledge of compliance and cloud security constraints (PCI-DSS, SOC2)