[Hiring] Senior QA Engineer @Impact.com

Role Description

The Senior QA Engineer for Programmatic XP owns the quality strategy for our programmatic publishing capability, the systems that let publishers monetize 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:

• API & Contract Testing
  • 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.
  • Test the decisioning logic itself, not just the HTTP envelope.
  • Cover authentication and authorization, negative and malformed input, boundary and idempotency behaviour, versioning and backwards compatibility, and performance and latency under representative load.
• Data & Report Validation (SQL)
  • Prove the numbers by tracing an event from capture through the pipelines into the reporting surfaces.
  • Write and own non-trivial SQL to interrogate reporting datasets independently.
  • Validate persistence in operational stores, writing via UI or API.
  • Build the test-data strategy for realistic data.
• Event & Edge Processing (Kafka)
  • Test the event-driven seams at the edges of the squad's systems.
  • Assert on message contracts and schema evolution.
• Frontend & UI Quality
  • Own automated coverage of the squad's user-facing journeys.
  • Work effectively across two generations of frontend.
  • Test at the right level for each: end-to-end journeys, component-level tests, and visual or layout assertions.
• Logs, Monitoring & Production Quality
  • Read and interpret logs as a primary diagnostic skill.
  • Use log and metric evidence to reproduce defects precisely.
  • Work with dashboards and monitoring tooling (Grafana or equivalent).
  • Define quality signals and thresholds that gate a release.
• Third-Party & Cross-System Integrations
  • Own quality for the squad's external and cross-team dependencies.
  • Design the isolation strategy for testing.
• AI-Augmented Testing
  • Put AI to work in the squad's day-to-day engineering.
  • Apply real judgment to AI output.
  • Stay ahead of the tooling under your own steam.
• Quality Strategy, Process & Influence
  • Define and own the squad's test strategy.
  • Embed quality gates into CI/CD.
  • Define, track and report the quality metrics that matter.
  • Partner with the Product Manager and Tech Lead to sharpen requirements.
  • Raise the bar around you by mentoring QA peers.

Qualifications

• 6+ years hands-on QA / SDET experience.
• API testing depth.
• Contract testing in practice.
• Strong SQL, used as a testing instrument.
• Event-driven testing experience.
• UI automation competence.
• Monitoring fluency.
• Practical AI in engineering workflows.
• Infrastructure foundations: containerisation, CI/CD pipelines, cloud ecosystems.
• Champion of quality.
• Structured problem framing.
• Judgment without full information.
• Self-directed learning.
• Excellent communication and influence.

Requirements

• BigQuery experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience testing a high-throughput, low-latency serving service.
• 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

• Flexible Working: Responsible PTO policy.
• Health and Wellness: Up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year.
• A Stake in Our Growth: Restricted Stock Units (RSUs).
• Investing in Your Growth: Free Coursera subscription and PXA courses.
• Parental Support: 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: Technology stipend and monthly internet allowance.