Quality Assurance Engineer

Join Toptal’s Elite Network of Freelance Talent

General Information

Responsibilities

• Own test automation strategy & governance
• Define a shift-left test strategy across unit, integration, contract, E2E, performance, security, and resiliency.
• Establish quality gates (defects, coverage, flakiness budgets, performance SLOs) and release criteria.
• Shift left testing: requirements → tests → results → evidence traceability model.
• Build a reusable automation framework
• Architect a test framework packaged for reuse across CEE teams.
• Provide libraries/utilities for API, Solace messaging, database, and contract testing.
• Standardize test data management, deterministic fixtures, and parallel/ephemeral execution patterns.
• Event-driven architecture (EDA) testing
• Validate producer/consumer contracts, schema evolution, and topic compatibility.
• Assert ordering, idempotency, exactly/at-least/at-most-once semantics, replay, DLQ handling, and deduplicate keys.
• Prove back-pressure, throttling, and consumer lag behavior under bursty market loads; chaos test broker clusters.
• Enforce schema/contract gates in CI/CD; prevent breaking changes before promote.

Data-Platform & Reconciliation Qa

• Automate data quality checks for market/reference data, order/trade states, and downstream stores (SQL Server/Azure SQL).
• Implement reconciliation across OMS/EMS, risk, and settlement; verify lineage and PII/PCI masking where relevant.
• Use SQL and profiling to validate accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and SCD/versioned data behaviors.
• Manage golden datasets and synthetic market data at scale for repeatable regression.
• Pipelines, environments & observability
• Embed suites in Azure DevOps (build → deploy → smoke → regression → perf/security) with mandatory gates (coverage, static analysis, compliance, performance).
• Orchestrate tests on AKS with Docker/Kubernetes, ephemeral environments.
• Validate OpenTelemetry to correlate trace IDs across services; validate Application Insights/Dynatrace signals in assertions.
• Performance & security
• Baseline latency/throughput; run JMeter/LoadRunner for spike/soak/failover; collaborate on capacity tuning.
• Automate OWASP checks (ZAP), enforce SAST/DAST and dependency scanning (Snyk) with remediation gating.
• Leadership & operations
• Lead QA activities in the project, mentor developers on testability and quality by design.
• Contribute to incident response, RCA, production canary/verification suites, and reliability playbooks.

Tech Stack Focus

• Languages/Frameworks: C#, Python, xUnit, PyTest, Pact, Docker,
• Testing: xUnit, NUnit, MSTest, Pact.NET, Moq/AutoFixture, TestContainers-style patterns
• APIs/Messaging: REST/GraphQL/SOAP, Solace (preferred), RabbitMQ or Kafka (plus)
• Data: SQL Server, Azure SQL; strong SQL for validation/migrations; data profiling tools

• Cloud And Infra: Azure, AKS, Docker And Kubernetes; Terraform And Bicep And ARM

• CI/CD & Quality: Azure DevOps, Git/Azure Repos, coverage/linters, policy-driven gates
• Perf/Sec/Obs: JMeter/LoadRunner, OWASP ZAP, Snyk, Application Insights, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry

• Secrets: Azure Key Vault

• (Nice) FIX conformance via QuickFIX/N simulators; schema registry tooling

Required Experience

• 8+ years in QA/engineering with 5+ in financial/trading systems (order lifecycle, market data, risk controls)
• Proven delivery of pipeline-integrated .NET automation frameworks and regulated-market audits
• Deep understanding of EDA QA (contracts, ordering, idempotency, replay, DLQs, back-pressure) and data-quality/reconciliation
• Hands-on with Azure/AKS, Azure DevOps, and performance/security automation at scale
• Clear communicator; able to lead cross-functional quality initiatives and coach engineers
• Strong English proficiency required

Bonus Experience

• ISTQB Advanced/CSTE, Azure Fundamentals / Azure DevOps Engineer
• Finance certs (CFA/FRM), Agile/Scrum experience

Additional Details

• **Location:**

Abu Dhabi (Uae)

• **Work model:**

Onsite In Abu Dhabi

• or remote
• within 3h of the Abu Dhabi time zone
• **Type:**

40h And Week Contract

• **Duration:**
• 6-12 months initially, with long-term engagement potential
• **Authorization:**
• Applicants must be authorized to work in their country of residence without employer sponsorship