Senior QA Engineer

Job Title: Senior QA Engineer
Location: Remote (Global) | HQ: Bellevue, WA, London, UK
Company: SunCore Digital
Employment Type: Full-time (40 hrs/week)
Experience Level: Senior (5+ years)

About the Role

SunCore Digital is seeking a Senior QA Engineer / Quality Lead to establish and lead quality practices across our web applications, Flutter mobile applications, APIs, backend services, and third-party integrations.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will define the overall testing strategy, identify the highest-risk workflows, establish release-readiness criteria, and coordinate quality activities across QA and engineering.

You will directly test the most critical and complex areas, but you will not be expected to personally execute every test across the entire platform. You will guide and mentor a Web and Backend QA Engineer and a Mobile QA Engineer, while working closely with software engineers, technical leads, product stakeholders, UI/UX, platform engineering, reliability, security, and project management.

The Senior QA owns the quality strategy and independent quality assessment. Software engineers remain responsible for testing and the quality of their own implementations.

Responsibilities

Quality strategy and leadership

●      Assess the current state of testing across the application portfolio.

●      Define and maintain a practical quality strategy covering web, mobile, APIs, backend services, and integrations.

●      Identify launch-critical and business-critical workflows.

●      Determine the appropriate mix of manual, automated, exploratory, integration, end-to-end, regression, security, performance, and recovery testing.

●      Establish release-readiness criteria and minimum required test evidence.

●      Define defect severity, quality reporting, regression standards, and escalation expectations.

●      Maintain visibility into tested, partially tested, untested, and unverified functionality.

●      Identify quality risks and testing gaps without filling unknowns with assumptions.

●      Recommend automation priorities based on risk and value.

●      Improve quality practices without introducing unnecessary process or creating a release bottleneck.

Test planning and risk assessment

●      Review requirements, acceptance criteria, designs, and major technical changes before implementation.

●      Identify ambiguous business rules, missing acceptance criteria, edge cases, and testability concerns.

●      Create risk-based test plans for launches, major releases, integrations, and high-impact changes.

●      Assign testing scope across the Web and Backend QA Engineer, Mobile QA Engineer, developers, and supporting engineering functions.

●      Define the regression scope for each meaningful release.

●      Ensure critical workflows receive appropriate end-to-end and regression coverage.

Hands-on testing

●      Personally test the highest-risk workflows and complex cross-system behavior.

●      Lead exploratory testing for major releases and launch-readiness reviews.

●      Validate workflows involving financial calculations, permissions, data isolation, external integrations, and irreversible or high-impact actions.

●      Investigate complex, intermittent, cross-platform, or difficult-to-reproduce defects.

●      Independently validate major fixes and high-risk changes.

●      Verify that defects receive suitable regression coverage.

Automation leadership

●      Evaluate existing automated tests and identify meaningful gaps.

●      Define the automation strategy across web, APIs, mobile, and end-to-end workflows.

●      Develop selected high-value automated tests where appropriate.

●      Review automation created by QA engineers and developers.

●      Work with developers to strengthen unit, component, integration, and contract testing.

●      Work with platform and DevOps engineers to integrate testing into CI/CD.

●      Identify flaky, obsolete, unreliable, or low-value automated tests.

●      Ensure automation exists to protect important workflows rather than simply increase a metric.

Release and launch readiness

●      Coordinate quality validation across web, mobile, APIs, backend services, and integrations.

●      Produce factual release-readiness assessments showing:

○      What was tested

○      What passed

○      What failed

○      What was not tested

○      Which defects remain open

○      Which risks remain unresolved

●      Provide an independent quality recommendation for releases and public launch.

●      Escalate critical quality, data-integrity, security, or reliability concerns.

●      Partner with engineering leadership on go/no-go decisions.

Final risk acceptance and launch approval remain with engineering and business leadership.

Cross-functional quality coordination

●      Work with SRE to define realistic business scenarios and acceptance criteria for performance and load testing.

●      Work with security specialists on role-based access, authorization, data isolation, and security regression scenarios.

●      Work with recovery specialists to validate application behavior after backup restoration or recovery exercises.

●      Work with DevOps and platform engineers on test environments, CI/CD execution, version traceability, and deployment validation.

●      Work with business stakeholders to confirm the expected behavior of financial, operational, and customer workflows.

●      Work with UI/UX to validate usability, responsive behavior, accessibility, and consistency.

Mentorship and team leadership

●      Mentor the Web and Backend QA Engineer and Mobile QA Engineer.

●      Review test plans, test cases, defect reports, and automation.

●      Establish consistent testing practices across both QA functions.

●      Coordinate workloads based on release risk and team capacity.

●      Help QA staff develop stronger technical, analytical, and automation skills.

●      Maintain clear boundaries between QA, developer, product, platform, reliability, security, and recovery responsibilities.

Initial Priorities

●      Inventory existing tests, tools, environments, and test data.

●      Identify launch-critical workflows.

●      Establish a risk-based launch regression plan.

●      Define defect severity and release-readiness criteria.

●      Determine which critical workflows have been tested, partially tested, or remain untested.

●      Review the existing defect backlog.

●      Assess current automation and identify priority gaps.

●      Establish quality reporting for leadership.

●      Create a clear division of responsibilities among the three QA roles.

●      Mentor both QA staff members and establish practical working standards.

Performance/load testing, benchmark testing, and formal code-coverage measurement are known capabilities that still need to be established. The Senior QA will contribute business scenarios and quality requirements, while engineering leadership determines ownership, priority, implementation approach, and timing.

Required Qualifications

●      At least seven years of professional software quality or test-engineering experience.

●      Experience as a Senior QA Engineer, QA Lead, Test Lead, Quality Engineering Lead, or comparable role.

●      Experience defining quality strategy across multiple applications or product surfaces.

●      Strong experience testing web applications, APIs, backend services, and integrations.

●      Working knowledge of mobile testing, preferably Flutter applications.

●      Strong knowledge of functional, exploratory, regression, integration, API, and end-to-end testing.

●      Experience leading release-readiness testing and quality-risk reporting.

●      Experience evaluating products with incomplete documentation or immature QA processes.

●      Experience designing meaningful test automation.

●      Familiarity with modern web, API, or mobile automation tools.

●      Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and automated test execution.

●      Experience testing authentication, authorization, permissions, and data isolation.

●      Experience validating data-driven workflows and calculations.

●      Strong defect investigation and root-cause collaboration skills.

●      Experience mentoring QA staff.

●      Strong written and verbal communication.

●      Ability to work directly with engineering leadership and communicate risk clearly.

●      Comfort working in a small, evolving engineering organization.

Preferred Qualifications

●      Experience establishing or rebuilding a QA function.

●      Experience preparing a product for its first external users.

●      Experience in a startup or small engineering organization.

●      Experience with Flutter mobile applications.

●      Experience testing financial, transaction, operational, telemetry, equipment-monitoring, or field-service workflows.

●      Familiarity with fintech, digital assets, payments, identity verification, KYC, or AML-related testing.

●      Familiarity with performance, load, stress, and benchmark-testing concepts.

●      Familiarity with application-security testing.

●      Experience validating applications after backup restoration or recovery exercises.

●      Experience with asynchronous processing, webhooks, queues, scheduled jobs, or event-driven systems.

●      Experience in distributed or remote teams.

What Success Looks Like

●      Launch-critical workflows are identified and mapped to test coverage.

●      Testing responsibilities are clear across QA and engineering.

●      The company has a practical and repeatable regression process.

●      Defect severity and release-readiness criteria are consistently applied.

●      Leadership can clearly see what has and has not been tested.

●      High-risk workflows receive meaningful automated and manual coverage.

●      QA staff can operate independently within clear areas of ownership.

●      Releases include a factual quality-readiness assessment.

●      Quality improves without QA becoming the sole gate or bottleneck.

Bonus Points

●        Experience building a QA function from an early or informal stage.

●        Experience preparing a software platform for its first external users.

●        Experience mentoring or developing other QA professionals.

●        Familiarity with crypto, fintech, KYC, AML, or other regulated financial workflows.

●        Experience working in a remote, asynchronous startup environment.

Compensation & Benefits

●        Base Compensation: Competitive, based on experience, portfolio strength, and geographic location.

●        Milestone Bonuses: 10% milestone bonus awarded to every team member assisting with the MVP build-out.

●        Annual Performance Bonus: Represents a significant percentage of total compensation.

●        Benefits for Domestic Hires: Health, dental, and vision plans.

●        Annual Paid Offsite: Team retreats in Caribbean, Hawaii, ski destinations, and other exciting locations.

Why Join SunCore Digital?

●        High-impact role in a rapidly scaling digital company.

●        Fully remote team with async flexibility.

●        Direct collaboration with executive leadership and best-in-class marketing/design partners.

●        Opportunity to shape QA processes and mentor junior team members.

●        Competitive compensation with performance upside.