Senior QA Engineer

60 Degrees; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 989,283 - 1,319,044; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous annual and life leave allocation

Market-related salaries

Ownership of company through VSOP

Flexible working environment

Job summary

A leading fintech company is seeking a Senior QA Engineer to revolutionize its quality assurance function in card payment systems. This remote-first role involves leading the QA strategy, ensuring compliance with ISO-8583 standards, and pioneering AI-driven automation. Candidates should possess extensive QA experience, a deep understanding of end-to-end card payment flows, and proactive ownership of their work. Join a diverse, high-performance team dedicated to redefining digital payments across Africa with flexibility and growth opportunities.

Qualifications

• Experience with ISO8583-based message flows and message validation.
• Hands-on experience in testing payment processing systems.
• Ability to work effectively in remote teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the quality assurance strategy for card payment systems.
• Design and execute comprehensive test plans and risk-based testing.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to identify improvements in quality practices.

Skills

QA experience validating EMV transaction flows

Deep understanding of end-to-end card payment flows

Ability to design risk-based test strategies

Strong communication skills in English

Proactive ownership of projects

Education

Relevant degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Jira

Cypress

Postman

Git

Job description

Senior QA Engineer – Card Rails

Location: Remote first. Head Office: Cape Town, South Africa; with offices in Johannesburg, Mauritius and Nairobi, Kenya.

Department: Engineering – Card Rails

Company: Peach Payments

About Peach Payments: Peach Payments is a cutting‑edge fintech company shaping the future of digital payments across Africa. We empower businesses of all sizes—from startups to enterprise merchants—by providing a secure, scalable, and seamless payments infrastructure.

Team Mission: Card Rails is a POD within the Card Processing Tribe that builds and maintains the Card Gateway services, integrations with Acquiring banks, the Card Gateway infrastructure, Acquirer connectivity, and monitoring and alerting. Our mission is to provide reliable, compliant, and secure card payment processing that is cost‑effective for the following transactions:

• Card Not Present (CNP) ecommerce transactions.
• Card Present (CP) in‑store transactions.

Role Overview

Peach Payments is revolutionizing its Quality Assurance function, transitioning to a proactive, shift‑left approach where QA Engineers are embedded within engineering pods. As a Senior QA Engineer within the Card Rails team, you will occupy a critical junction between legacy stability and future innovation. You will own and lead the quality assurance strategy, ensuring our systems meet rigorous ISO‑8583 standards for Acquirer and Scheme sign‑off, while simultaneously architecting AI‑driven automation to redefine how we validate payment lifecycles.

Technology Stack:

• Languages: Typescript, Javascript, Node.js
• Infrastructure: AWS Lambda, Serverless
• Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL
• Tools: Jira, Confluence, Git, K6.io, Cypress, Postman
• CI/CD & Automation: GitLab Pipelines
• Monitoring: Fusion Reactor / Logz.io

Role Expectations

Payments Domain Quality Assurance

• Deep understanding of end‑to‑end card payment flows, from authorization through clearing, settlement, and reconciliation, across both Card‑Present (CP) and Card‑Not‑Present (CNP) channels.
• Ability to design risk‑based test strategies aligned with payment scheme rules, merchant use‑cases, and regulatory requirements.

EMV & Card‑Present Processing

• QA experience validating EMV transaction flows (contact & contactless), including application selection, CVM processing, offline vs online decisioning, and issuer scripting.
• Validation of EMV tags, TLV structures, and kernel behaviour across different transaction paths.
• Hands‑on L3 device testing, including certification‑style functional, negative, and edge‑case testing.
• Validation of terminal behaviour against scheme and kernel specifications.
• Coordination of regression testing across firmware, kernel, and host changes.

Ecommerce & Card‑Not‑Present Processing

• Quality assurance for eCommerce card transactions, including authorization, capture, refund, and reversal flows.
• 3D Secure (where applicable), fraud signals, and risk decisioning scenarios.
• Idempotency, retry logic, and failure‑mode testing for high‑volume online traffic.

Authorization Models

• Test design and validation for pre‑authorizations, incremental authorizations, and delayed captures, including amount adjustments, partial captures, and expiry handling.
• Scheme‑specific rules and edge cases across different acquirers and merchant categories.
• State consistency across payment lifecycle events.

Tokenization & Sensitive Data Handling

• QA coverage for card tokenization flows, including token creation, storage, lifecycle management, and detokenization controls.
• Validation of PCIDSS‑aligned data handling and masking rules.
• Testing of token usage across recurring, stored‑card, and merchant‑initiated transactions.

Payment Switch & Acquirer Connectivity

• Testing of payment switch processing, including routing logic, fail‑over behaviour, and timeout handling.
• Acquirer‑specific rules, field mappings, and response code handling.
• Resilience, concurrency, and throughput testing under peak transaction loads.

Payment Scheme Processing

• QA validation aligned with card scheme specifications (e.g., Visa, Mastercard), including transaction types, reason codes, and lifecycle consistency.
• Compliance with scheme mandates and rule changes.
• Regression strategies to safely roll out scheme updates.

ISO8583 Message Validation

• Strong experience testing ISO8583‑based message flows, including field‑level validation, mandatory/conditional fields, and bitmap handling.
• Mapping correctness between internal domain models and external switch/acquirer messages.
• Negative testing for malformed messages, unexpected fields, and protocol deviations.

Observability & Production Quality

• Ability to define payment‑specific quality metrics, such as authorization success rates, decline patterns, and scheme error distributions.
• Use of logs, metrics, and traces to correlate transaction‑level issues across distributed payment systems and external partners.

Required Soft Skills

• Strategic Solution Design: Ability to design elegant, scalable solutions for new acquirer integrations and to tackle systemic quality problems at scale.
• Proactive Ownership: Take initiative, own projects end‑to‑end, thrive in fast‑paced, high‑scale environments, and proactively identify and propose solutions for quality gaps while abstracting testing complexity.
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Work effectively in fully remote teams, with strong written and verbal English communication skills, comfortable collaborating cross‑functionally with product, operations, and external partners.
• Technical Articulation: Ability to clearly articulate complex technical and quality concepts to diverse audiences.
• Mentor and empower engineers in quality practices and tooling through constructive feedback.

Why Join Peach Payments?

• Impact: Work on mission‑critical payments infrastructure processing millions of transactions.
• Growth: Be part of a fast‑growing company expanding across Africa.
• Culture: Join a high‑performance, diverse, and empathetic team focused on respect for people and merchant success.
• Flexibility: Remote‑first hybrid working—work from anywhere while staying connected to a world‑class team.
• Benefits: Generous annual and life leave allocation, market‑related salaries, ownership of the Peach pie through VSOP, and more.

Be part of our journey to redefine digital payments in Africa! At Peach Payments we value diversity and are committed to inclusion across race, gender, age, religion, identity, and experiences.