Senior QA Engineer - Commerce

QA Senior Software Engineer - Commerce

Location: Remote and/or hybrid

With offices located in Cape Town, South Africa; Mokka, Mauritius and Nairobi, Kenya

Department: Engineering - Commerce 

Company: Peach Payments

About Peach Payments

Peach Payments is a fast-growing African payment solution provider (PSP) that helps ambitious businesses grow by solving the complexity that comes with scale.  For businesses that need a comprehensive payment solution across Africa, Peach Payments delivers payments orchestration, robust security, optimised conversions, and dedicated support via one integration. . 

We power digital commerce for some of Africa’s most loved brands, including Travelstart,Samsonite, Mukuru, Netflorist, Digicape, and MyRunway, alongside thousands of growing businesses building their future online.

With over 180 team members, the company has offices in South Africa, Kenya and Mauritius, and processes payments in 11 African countries across West, East and Central Africa, with further territories coming soon. Peach Payments gives businesses the infrastructure and flexibility they need to operate across borders, reach more customers and expand with confidence

Team Mission Commerce is a POD within the Access Tribe and which builds and maintains the Checkout services. Our mission is to build, maintain and continuously improve a reliable, secure and fast checkout experience that enables trustworthy payments for every customer.

🕵🏿 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 Commerce pod, you will own the quality strategy for checkout services, lead scalable test automation, ensure security and compliance validation, and partner with engineering, product, and security to deliver a fast, reliable, and safe payment experience at scale.

  Our Tech Stack

• Languages: Typescript, Python

• Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, Serverless)

• Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL

• Tools: Jira, Confluence, Git, K6.io, Cypress, Postman

• CI/CD & Automation: GitLab Pipelines

• Monitoring: Sentry, Grafana

Role expectations

Core responsibilities

• Own quality strategy for checkout services: define and maintain the test strategy, risk-based testing plans, and acceptance criteria that align with product goals and regulatory requirements.

• Design and implement scalable test automation: lead the creation of robust test frameworks (API, UI, integration, performance) and ensure maintainability, reusability, and fast feedback.

• Champion security and compliance testing: collaborate with security, privacy, and compliance teams to validate controls (PCI-DSS considerations, data handling, encryption, access controls) and carry out threat modeling where appropriate.

• Ensure reliability and performance at scale: plan and execute performance, soak, resiliency, and chaos testing; define SLOs/SLA-driven test coverage and reporting.

• Validate payments workflows end-to-end: verify success flows, retries, refunds, cancellations, failed payments, fraud detection signals, and rollback scenarios across gateways, banks, and PSPs.

• Improve quality metrics and visibility: establish meaningful metrics (defect escape rate, test coverage, automation ROI, MTTR) and provide actionable dashboards to stakeholders.

• Collaborate across the lifecycle: work closely with product, platform, development, security, and SRE to embed quality into design, code, and release processes; participate in design reviews and incident post-mortems.

• Drive risk-based release planning: assess release risks, define test windows, and ensure adequate coverage for changes in payments, risk rules, and integration points before production.

• Mentor and elevate the team: coach software engineers, share best practices, review test plans and code, and help raise the overall quality culture.

• Continuous improvement: lead initiatives for test automation, tooling, and process improvements; advocate for quality-focused culture and proactive defect prevention.

• Technical expectations

• Strong hands-on testing skills across domains: API (REST), microservices, frontend (web/mobile), and end-to-end checkout flows.

• Automation leadership: design, implement, and maintain scalable automation frameworks; maintainable test data management; reliable test execution in CI/CD.

• API and integration testing: thorough validation of payment gateway integrations, retries, idempotency keys, webhooks, and asynchronous workflows.

• Security-minded testing: threat modeling input; validation of PCI-relevant controls, data masking, secure defaults, and vulnerability scanning.

• Performance and resilience testing: load testing, throughput, latency targets, and failure injection to verify recovery procedures.

• Observability and reporting: create meaningful test reports, logs, and traces; use monitoring tools to correlate quality signals with production stability.

Process and collaboration expectations

• Align with product and business priorities: participate in backlog grooming, define risk-based test plans, and ensure critical paths are covered.

• Test design and documentation: maintain clear, concise test cases, acceptance criteria, and testing dashboards; ensure traceability to requirements.

• Release readiness and sign-off: declare production readiness with confidence, ensure rollback plans, and support post-release validation.

• Quality advocate: promote shift-left practices, early involvement in feature design, and cross-team QA ownership.

• Compliance and audit readiness: ensure traceability for audits, maintain records of testing activities relevant to regulatory requirements.

Metrics and success indicators

• Defect leakage to production reduced; faster MTTR for critical issues.

• Automation coverage growth and stable automation suite with low flake rate.

• Measurable improvements in checkout latency/throughput within defined targets.

• Clear, actionable quality metrics delivered to stakeholders on a regular cadence.

Required soft skills:

• Strategic Solution Design: Ability to design elegant, scalable solutions and 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 - Benefits include a generous annual and life leave allocation, market related salaries, owning the piece 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.