QA Engineer (Manual & Automation) - Cape Town

Pinewood.AI; Cape Town; Hybrid; ZAR 350,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinewood.AI in Cape Town seeks a technically strong QA Engineer to own quality for the Automotive Intelligence Platform. You will blend hands-on manual testing with automation to ensure features are fit for purpose, reliable, and releasable.

You will work with engineering and product teams, design meaningful tests, and advocate for risk-based approaches. The role is hybrid (about 2/3 onsite) and offers a chance to shape QA practices in a growing automotive software company.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in manual QA within Agile environments.
• Ability to design meaningful test scenarios and edge cases.
• Familiarity with automation frameworks a plus.
• Strong communication and collaboration with devs.

Responsibilities

• Own manual testing for assigned features from refinement to release.
• Design and execute risk-based test scenarios.
• Perform functional, regression, exploratory, and integration tests.
• Validate requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Identify defects with clear reproduction steps.
• Support root-cause analysis with developers.
• Contribute to backlog refinement and release planning.
• Protect data and adhere to security policies.

Skills

Manual testing

Agile testing

Test planning

Exploratory testing

Risk-based testing

Cross-browser testing

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

Postman

Jira

Azure DevOps

Git

Job description

Pinewood.AI is seeking a technically strong, hands-on QA Engineer to deliver our quality strategy for our Automotive Intelligence Platform.

We are seeking a QA Engineer with a strong manual testing mindset who has some experience with automation testing and takes ownership of product quality and user experience. This role focuses on thoughtful, risk-based testing, clear communication, and collaboration.

You’ll work closely with engineering and product teams to ensure features are fit for purpose, reliable, and releasable, while contributing to continuous improvement of our QA approach.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own manual testing for assigned features from refinement to release
• Design and execute meaningful test scenarios, not just scripted cases
• Perform functional, regression, exploratory, and integration testing
• Validate requirements and acceptance criteria
• Identify risk, edge cases, and user-impacting defects early
• Provide clear go/no-go quality assessments for releases
• Raise clear, actionable defects with strong reproduction steps
• Assess severity, priority, and customer impact
• Work closely with developers to support root-cause analysis
• Retest fixes thoroughly and verify acceptance
• Engage actively in backlog refinement, planning, and retros
• Challenge unclear or incomplete requirements constructively
• Communicate quality status, risks, and confidence clearly
• Contribute ideas to improve QA practices and consistency
• Support regression and release testing activities
• Responsible for contributing towards the organisation's information security strategy, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and compliance with relevant regulations, while managing risk and adhering to all established security measures
• Work in a hybrid model (approx. 2/3 days onsite)

• Strong manual testing experience in Agile environments

• Experience with at least one automation tool or framework (e.g. Playwright, Cypress, Selenium)
• Solid understanding of testing principles and techniques
• Ability to test across browsers, devices, and environments
• Experience with defect tracking tools (e.g. Jira, Azure DevOps)
• API testing basics (e.g. Postman)
• Comfortable validating data (basic SQL or equivalent)
• Familiarity with version control (Git) is a plus
• Thinks like a user, not just a tester
• Focuses on risk and impact, not box-ticking
• Cares deeply about shipped quality
• Shift left experience in the development cycle

Desirable Experience:

• Testing dealer management systems or automotive retail software.
• Familiarity with service scheduling, parts inventory, warranty workflows and aftersales processes.
• Experience integrating Playwright or similar tools into Microsoft tech stacks and cloud CI pipelines.

Why Join Pinewood.AI?
This is a rare opportunity to help shape the QA function in a fast-growing, innovative automotive software company. You’ll work with modern tools and approaches, have a direct impact on release quality, and play a pivotal role in helping us deliver outstanding products to automotive retailers and OEMs across the globe. With a culture that values collaboration, continuous improvement, and technical excellence, Pinewood.AI is the place to make your mark.

About Us:
Our story began more than 20 years ago, but right from the start, it has been rooted in the specific needs of the automotive industry. As automotive professionals as well as technologists, we wanted to build practical technology solutions that were designed around how automotive businesses work, recognising what makes them different. Pinewood.AI is an unparalleled Automotive Intelligence Platform that enables automotive retail customers and OEMs to drive growth and profitability throughout every aspect of their business.

Pinewood’s cloud-based, secure end-to-end ecosystem unlocks the value of every customer. Our vision is to be the full-service technology partner that helps automotive retailers and OEMs run more efficiently and increase revenue by making better commercial and business decisions more easily.