The Senior QA Engineer for Programmatic XP owns the quality strategy for our programmatic publishing capability, the systems that let publishers monetise their inventory and let advertisers buy placements across our network. This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role inside a single squad, not a management position. You are the quality authority for the squad: you design and build the automation, you decide what "release-ready" means, and you raise the engineering bar of the developers around you through review, pairing and example rather than through headcount. The work is backend- and data-heavy. This is a high-throughput, real-time decisioning path plus a configuration surface. Most of your day is APIs, contracts, SQL and production signals with a real but secondary frontend surface.What You'll Do:Own automated coverage of the squad's REST/JSON surfaces APIs, and the high-throughput serving path.Build and maintain consumer-driven contract tests across service boundaries, so a breaking change in an upstream or downstream dependency is caught at build time rather than in production.Test the decisioning logic itself, not just the HTTP envelope.Cover the unglamorous half properly: authentication and authorisation, negative and malformed input, boundary and idempotency behaviour, versioning and backwards compatibility, and performance and latency under representative load.Prove the numbers. Trace an event from the point of capture through the pipelines into the reporting surfaces, and validate that customer-facing reports agree with the source of truth.Write and own non-trivial SQL to interrogate reporting datasets independently, reconciliation checks, aggregation and attribution correctness.Validate persistence ting via UI or API, then proving the resulting state is correct and consistent across stores.Build the test-data strategy for a domain where realistic data is the hard part: representative data that make the interesting cases reachable.Test the event-driven seams at the edges of the squad's systems, the messages published and consumed for downstream monetisation events.Assert on message contracts and schema evolution, and cover the failure modes that green functional suites miss.Own automated coverage of the squad's user-facing journeys — multi-step configuration and setup wizards where state carries across several screens and a partial save is as important to test as a happy path.Work effectively across two generations of frontend: legacy server-rendered screens that predate modern tooling and are unforgiving to naive automation, and modern component-based frontends built in TypeScript.Test at the right level for each: end-to-end journeys where the risk is cross-screen state, component-level tests where the risk is rendering and behaviour, and visual or layout assertions where presentation itself is the product.Validate the behaviour revenue depends on: form and validation correctness, permission-dependent rendering, and the tracking and click-through wiring behind user-facing elements.Read and interpret logs as a primary diagnostic skill. Work backwards through application logs across services to a specific cause, correlating a single request or transaction across service boundaries rather than guessing from symptoms.Use log and metric evidence to reproduce defects precisely, to distinguish a genuine product bug from a data, configuration or environment problem, and to write the regression test that closes it.Work with dashboards and monitoring tooling (Grafana or equivalent) to read the health of the squad's systems — request volume and error rates, latency distributions, drop-off through the processing funnel, and dependency failure and cache behaviour.Define the quality signals and thresholds that gate a release, and make regressions visible in minutes rather than in a month-end revenue query.Contribute to post-incident analysis with a bias toward "what test or signal would have caught this", and close the loop in automation.Own quality for the squad's external and cross-team dependencies — commerce and external data-enrichment providers.Design the isolation strategy: where to use contract tests, where to use service virtualisation or stubs, and where a real sandbox integration is the only honest test — and know why for each.Put AI to work in the squad's day-to-day engineering: agentic workflows, MCP servers and agent skills, and AI-assisted test generation, triage and exploratory testing.Apply real judgment to AI output. Generated tests that pass but assert nothing are worse than no tests; build the harnesses and review discipline that keep AI-produced work honest.Stay ahead of the tooling under your own steam; learn deliberately and continuously rather than waiting to be sent on a course.Share what works. What you prove out here should propagate into how the wider QA function operates.Define and own the squad's test strategy across functional, regression, integration, contract, performance and data-quality testing, and the risk-based calls about what gets automated and what does not.Embed quality gates into CI/CD so coverage, contract verification and data checks run on every change; keep the suites fast, stable and trusted.Define, track and report the quality metrics that matter for a revenue-critical product — escaped defects, coverage of the critical path, automation stability, time-to-detect. Hold yourself to outcomes on those numbers, not to volume of test activity.Take the quality problems nobody assigned you. Move quickly and iterate on the reversible calls; reserve the slow, careful path for the ones that are hard to undo.Partner with the Product Manager and Tech Lead to sharpen requirements and acceptance criteria before build, and own release-readiness and go/no-go input.Raise the bar around you: pair with engineers, onboard new joiners into the squad's quality practices, and mentor QA peers across the group; partner with QA Platform & Enablement to adopt and feed back on next-generation tooling.Essential Requirements6+ years hands-on QA / SDET experience, with demonstrable recent ownership of automated coverage for a long-lived production product.API testing depth — core of the role. Talk concretely about the frameworks used, what you asserted, how you handled auth, negatives and versioning, and how you proved a write actually landed.Contract testing in practice. Hands-on experience with consumer-driven contract testing (Pact or equivalent) across service boundaries in CI — not just awareness.Strong SQL, used as a testing instrument. Independently query warehouses and operational databases to validate data and reports. BigQuery experience is strongly preferred; equivalent large-scale analytical SQL is acceptable.Event-driven testing experience. Hands-on with Kafka or an equivalent broker: schemas and contracts, ordering, duplication, replay, idempotency and consumer failure modes.UI automation competence. A modern framework (Playwright preferred) applied to stateful, multi-step journeys — plus pragmatism to work with legacy server-rendered screens and modern component-based frontends.Monitoring fluency. Use Grafana or equivalent to investigate behaviour and define quality signals.Practical AI in engineering workflows. Real experience with agentic AI, MCPs, agent skills, or building and using AI test harnesses — with critical judgment to know when output is wrong.Infrastructure foundations: containerisation (Docker), CI/CD pipelines, cloud ecosystems (GCP preferred), and comfort reading code in a polyglot stack (Java, Go, TypeScript).Champion of quality: track record of owning the quality standard for a product area and holding the line on it.Structured problem framing: clarify ambiguous problem and map upstream/downstream effects before proposing a solution; show how reframing changed what you did.Judgment without full information: stress-test a recommendation, a report or a generated output and decide to act when certainty isn't available.Self-directed learning: ramp across a legacy frontend stack, a real-time backend service and a large analytical warehouse; looking for a learning method, not a course list.Excellent communication and influence — share what you learn outward rather than hoarding it.Nice-to-HaveAd tech, programmatic, affiliate or marketplace domain experience — campaigns, placements, targeting, fill rate, attribution.Experience testing a high-throughput, low-latency serving service (Go preferred) and its caching layers.Performance and load testing of a real-time decisioning path.Experience leading a test framework migration.Familiarity with OWASP guidelines and security testing tools.Interest in SRE principles and production ownership.Experience testing AI/LLM-driven product features.Benefits and PerksAt impact.com, we believe that when you're happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That's why we've built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.Flexible Working: Responsible PTO policy and flexible environment to support work-life balance.Health and Wellness: mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year (with additional dependent coverage) and a monthly gym reimbursement policy.A Stake in Our Growth: Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.Investing in Your Growth: free Coursera subscription and PXA courses.Parental Support: 26 weeks fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.Technology Financial Support: technology stipend to set up home office and monthly allowance to cover internet expenses.
about 1 month ago