Principal Engineer, Quality Platform

Impact; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 1,500,000 - 2,100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible PTO

Mental health support

RSUs

Job summary

impact.com is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for the QA Platform to own the multi‑quarter technical vision, architecture, and roadmap. You will prototype, build, and ship critical tools, including CLIs and MCPs, to empower QA engineers and developers across product groups.

This is hands‑on leadership: you’ll write production code, mentor engineers, define quality standards, incorporate AI‑assisted testing, and influence cross‑team decisions while reporting to engineering leadership and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, Software Eng or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering.
• Proven track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams.
• Hands-on backend and infrastructure engineering for distributed systems.
• Experience with LLM/agent-based tooling and AI coding tools.

Responsibilities

• Set the multi-quarter technical vision, architecture and roadmap for the QA platform.
• Write code and prototype the hardest parts yourself, ensuring production reliability and security.
• Lead technically without authority, standards, and cross-team collaboration.

Skills

Backend engineering

LLM/agent tools

AI coding tools

CI/CD at scale

Technical writing

Distributed systems

Frontend familiarity

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

GCP

Kubernetes

TypeScript

Playwright

Java

Python

Job description

The Company: impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products— Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com: Quality at impact.com is an engineering problem: the platforms, frameworks and AI agents that let teams test well at speed. Today that work is spread across a team, with promising prototypes and no dedicated owner. As our Principal Software Engineer for the QA Platform, you'll be that owner. You’ll build our CLIs, MCPs, and full‑stack web apps used by hundreds of users and thousands of agents. The ideal candidate would be one of the founders or principal engineers at Playwright, Browserstack, Checksum, SauceLabs or similar dev tools companies. You'll set the technical direction for the QA platform: the frameworks, shared standards, quality context and AI agents that QA engineers and developers across our product groups rely on. You'll decide which prototypes become platforms and which are retired. This is a software engineering role, not a testing role: you'll build for QA the way a platform team builds for developers, as a multiplier for teams rather than a release gate. At this level you lead by doing. You're a hands‑on individual contributor with no direct reports, trusted to take on ambiguous problems, make consequential technical decisions, and bring people along through influence rather than authority.

What You’ll Do:

1. Set the direction. Own the multi‑quarter technical vision, architecture and roadmap for the QA platform. Turn ambiguous, cross‑team quality problems into clear technical direction, including ones nobody has fully defined yet. Decide what to build, buy, adopt or retire, and when a problem deserves something purpose‑built.
2. Build, hands‑on. Write code and prototype the hardest parts yourself, especially where the problem is new or the risk is high. Own what you ship in production: its reliability, security and cost. Bring AI into how we test where it measurably helps, and show the evidence when it doesn't.
3. Raise the bar and bring people with you. Define what good looks like for quality engineering at impact.com, including for AI‑assisted work, and hold that line across teams. Lead technically without authority: set standards, review designs and code, and mentor engineers across QA Enablement and the QA chapter. Partner with engineering leadership, and with the Engineering Enablement PM, who owns rollout and adoption. You own technical readiness and the evidence that the platform helps.

Essential requirements:

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering, including designing and delivering complex systems.
• A track record of setting technical direction across several teams, whatever your title. You've built platforms, frameworks or developer tools that other engineers adopted and relied on.
• Deep, hands‑on backend and infrastructure engineering: you design, build and run distributed, highly available production systems, and you still write code.
• Expert in at least one backend language, and able to work across others.
• You've built and shipped LLM‑ or agent‑based tools, and can show how you measured whether their output was good enough to trust.
• You use AI coding tools every day.
• Experience in test infrastructure, developer productivity or CI/CD at scale. You don't need a testing background, but you understand what makes tests fast and trusted.
• Clear technical writing: design docs and decisions that other teams act on, and explanations non‑technical audiences can follow.

Nice‑to‑have requirements:

• Building eval infrastructure for LLM or agent output, or testing other non‑deterministic systems.
• Giving AI agents the context they need, for example through MCP's and CLI's.
• Moving teams from fragmented tooling onto a shared standard.
• Enough front‑end skill to ship usable internal tools.
• Our stack includes Java and Python services on GCP and Kubernetes, with TypeScript and Playwright for test and UI work. Experience with them helps, but isn't required.
• The years are a guide, not a gate: what you've built and the scope you've owned matter more.
• If you've done most of this at a comparable level, apply.

Benefits and Perks

• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work‑life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well‑being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year , with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-ye