Senior QA Engineer, Platform at Altruist in San Francisco, CA

Job description

• The opportunity
• Altruist is in the midst of an exceptional growth phase and we're excited to hire a Senior QA Engineer to join our growing Platform team.
• The Platform team builds the shared backend services and infrastructure that every product team at Altruist depends on. That makes quality here a different problem: there is rarely a screen to click through, the consumers of what you test are other engineering teams, and a defect that escapes doesn't affect one feature — it affects everything built on top of it.
• In this role you'll own quality for distributed backend services, working at the API, contract, event, and data layers. You'll build durable automation that gives product teams confidence to move quickly, and you'll partner with Platform engineers to make services testable by design rather than verified after the fact. This is a hands-on role for someone who is genuinely comfortable in the backend and wants their testing to have leverage across the whole organization.

Responsibilities

• Your impact
• Own end-to-end functional testing for Platform services across API, event, and database layers
• Design and validate contracts between services, catching breaking changes before downstream product teams ever see them
• Build and maintain test automation frameworks in Java using REST Assured and Postman for API coverage, extending to Playwright or Selenium where Platform capabilities surface in the UI
• Write SQL and data validation to verify that API behavior, event streams, and persisted state actually agree
• Verify security fixes and cover the authentication/authorization paths
• Detect configuration drift across environments
• Test asynchronous and event-driven flows, including retries, idempotency, ordering, and failure recovery
• Integrate automated test suites into GitLab CI/CD pipelines so failures surface early and reliably
• Assess blast radius for Platform changes and define the regression scope that shared services require
• Partner with Platform engineers to build testability into services from design onward
• Use Jira to manage test cases, track defects, and support efficient agile workflows
• Leverage AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor to accelerate test script development, generate test data, and improve defect triage and reporting
• Identify quality gaps in processes and systems and champion continuous improvement across the testing function

Requirements

• Experience - 5+ years of experience as a QA Engineer or Software Test Engineer, ideally within a B2B financial services, fintech, or SaaS organization
• Strong hands-on experience testing backend services and APIs, with a demonstrated ability to uncover meaningful defects through exploratory and contract-level testing
• Experience testing microservices and distributed systems, where failures cross service boundaries
• Experience building, maintaining, and executing test plans in partnership with cross-functional teams
• Experience working in agile environments with a regular release cadence
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated regression coverage
• Education - B.A. / B.S. in Computer Science or a related field
• Technical aptitude - Proficiency with SQL and comfort validating data directly in the database; proficiency with Java or another object-oriented language; hands-on experience building API automation with REST Assured and Postman; able to get up to speed on modern backend stacks (Spring Boot, Postgres, Kubernetes, Kafka, Temporal, Snowflake)
• Ownership - Takes accountability for product quality end to end and proactively drives testing strategy, execution, and follow-through
• Superb communication - Communicates clearly with engineers, product managers, and cross-functional stakeholders to clarify requirements, surface risks, and drive alignment..
• Resilience - Thrives in a fast-paced environment, adapts to changing priorities, and maintains a high bar for quality under pressure
• Assurance - Brings sound judgment and confidence to testing decisions, defect triage, and release readiness recommendations
• Creative problem solving - Finds practical, scalable solutions to quality challenges and uses both exploratory thinking and automation to improve outcomes
• Practiced Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, pipelines in GitLab a plus
• Familiarity with data encryption methodologies focused on PII
• Familiarity with tooling such as Kafka, Debezium, Temporal, and OpenTelemetry
• Performance or load testing experience against backend services
• Experience testing behind feature flags and reasoning about coverage across flag states
• Experience testing AI-powered applications, including chatbots, assistants, or other LLM- or ML-based systems
• Knowledge of brokerage platforms and financial services industry, including margin, options, account types, and trade lifecycle

Skills

Required

• SQL
• Java
• REST Assured
• Postman
• Playwright
• Selenium
• GitLab CI/CD
• Jira
• Claude
• Cursor
• Spring Boot
• Postgres

Benefits

• Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is a priority. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and are cognizant of the ever-changing professional landscape. Our dynamic offering of perks and benefits are tailored for you to feel your best while doing your best.
• Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity.
• Competitive total compensation.
• Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).
• 401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.
• 16 week paid parental leave after one year of employment.
• Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.
• Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, and travel, etc.).
• Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home-purchasing preparedness, etc.).
• One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).
• Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with a bonus program for eligible roles. For salaried positions, a salary offer will be determined by a number of factors including experience, skill level, internal pay equity, geographic location, and other relevant business considerations. We review all employee pay and compensation programs regularly to ensure fair, equitable, and competitive pay. At Altruist, we are committed to providing fair, equitable, and competitive compensation by leveraging market data to inform our pay bands. Base salaries will be reviewed at regular intervals throughout the year, typically in conjunction with performance review cycles. By evaluating compensation on a regular basis, we are able to reward high performance and ensure all employees have opportunities for growth.
• $185,000 - $230,000 USD