QA Engineer

About CENSUS 

CENSUS LABS is a cyber-security engineering powerhouse specializing in securing products and organizations. Our identity is entrenched with professionalism, engineering, scientific mindset and hacking demeanor. Our work is research fueled, allowing us to provide a diverse set of professional services. CENSUS LABS is trusted to perform product security engagements helping our clients secure their solutions from conception to release in a realistic risk-based approach with our experience on end-to-end systems, including Secure Communications, IoT, Medical, Mobile and Vehicle Computer products. 

Learn more about CENSUS at census-labs.com. 

About the Job / Key Responsibilities 

CENSUS’ bespoke cybersecurity services are built upon a talented pool of Security Engineers, whose role extends beyond mere adherence to industry best practices. Quality is an integral part of how we engineer and validate our clients’ products, and we expect our QA Engineers to own it end-to-end: shaping the test strategy, building the automation that executes it, and producing the evidence that a product behaves exactly as specified. Across various engagement types, QA Engineers are responsible for translating product requirements into repeatable, automated verification, so that manual testing becomes the exception rather than the rule. 

We are looking for a talented & ambitious professional to grow our Cybersecurity Engineering team and join our ongoing mission to deliver in-depth and top-tier cybersecurity services to our valued clients. As part of this role, you will take over testing activities that are today performed manually and progressively turn them into a maintainable, automated test suite. You will treat the product as a black box, reasoning from requirements and observable behaviour rather than from implementation details, and you will work side-by-side with CENSUS internal and our clients’ development teams & partners, under long-term projects that involve: 

• Own the QA strategy for a full-stack product, translating product requirements and acceptance criteria into a structured, prioritized and traceable set of test cases. 

• Convert existing manual test cases into automated end-to-end, API and regression tests, and continuously extend automated coverage to the areas that carry the most risk. 

• Design, build and maintain the test automation framework, along with the test data, fixtures and environments it depends on. 

• Integrate automated test execution into CI/CD pipelines, so that every build produces a clear and trustworthy quality signal. 

• Investigate and triage failures, isolate each one down to a reproducible defect report, and follow issues through to closure with the development team. 

• Define and report quality metrics - coverage, pass rate, flakiness, defect escape rate, turning release readiness into a measurable statement rather than an opinion. 

• Work closely with product owners and engineering team to build testability into the product, and document test plans, results and assurance evidence as project deliverables. 

Minimum Qualifications 

• BSc or MSc in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. 

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in software quality assurance with a strong test automation component. Experience can be a QA / QA automation position, a software engineering role with test ownership, an equivalent role in other engineering organizations, or a combination of them. 

• Proven experience building automated test suites for web applications and/or backend APIs, either from scratch or by taking over an established manual testing process. 

• Solid programming skills in at least one language commonly used for test automation (e.g., Python, JavaScript / TypeScript, Java, or C#). 

• Proficient in English and great communication skills. 

Required Skills 

• A QA-first mindset: the ability to look at a product as a black box, reason about it from the user’s and the requirements’ perspective, and systematically hunt for the ways in which it can fail. 

• Strong command of test design techniques - equivalence partitioning, boundary analysis, state transitions, negative and edge-case testing (with the judgment to decide what is worth automating and what is not). 

• Hands-on experience with UI test automation frameworks for web frontends (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Selenium). 

• Hands-on experience with API and service-level test automation, including REST / HTTP interfaces, authentication flows, and integration or contract testing. 

• Experience with test frameworks and runners (e.g., pytest, Jest / Vitest, JUnit, TestNG) and a track record of writing maintainable, deterministic, non-flaky test code. 

• Working knowledge of CI/CD tooling (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and of executing test suites in containerized environments (Docker). 

• Comfortable with Linux, the command line, Git, and with reading application and system logs to investigate failures. 

• Ability to write precise defect reports, test plans and test reports that a client’s engineering team can act on directly. 

• Excellent ownership, problem solving skills, attention to detail, and willingness to learn/grow. 

Nice-to-Have Skills 

• Exposure to security-oriented testing, such as authentication and authorization abuse cases, input fuzzing, or basic use of tools like Burp Suite or OWASP ZAP. 

• Experience with performance or load testing frameworks (e.g., k6, JMeter, Locust). 

• Familiarity with databases, message queues or similar backend components, for test data setup and verification of server-side state. 

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code or environment provisioning to create reproducible test environments. 

• Experience working with international teams located in other regions and time zones around the world.