[Hiring] QA Senior Software Engineer @Peach Payments

QA Senior Software 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 and which 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): Instore 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 ISO8583 standards for Acquirer and Scheme sign-off, while simultaneously architecting AI-driven automation to redefine how we validate payment lifecycles.

Our Tech 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.
• 3-D 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 PCI-DSS-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, failover 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.

ISO-8583 Message Validation

• Strong experience testing ISO-8583-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 - 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.