Senior Quality Engineer

About the role:

We are seeking an experienced Senior Quality Engineer to join our Quality Engineering team at 8am. In this role, you will serve as a customer advocate and quality champion for your embedded scrum team, ensuring the functionality, reliability, performance, and user experience of our FinTech/Back-End SaaS platform through comprehensive testing strategies and collaborative engineering practices.

At 8am, Quality is not a phase—it's a mindset woven into every conversation, decision, and line of code. As a senior member of the team, you'll leverage your deep testing expertise to drive quality improvements that impact not just your immediate team but the broader engineering organization. You'll mentor junior engineers, contribute to process improvements, and take ownership of quality initiatives that protect and enhance our customers' experience.

About us:

At 8am, our vision is to power a world where professionals thrive. We start every day on a mission to empower professionals with the most trusted, innovative technology to deliver world-class outcomes for their clients and exceptional financial results for their business. They count on our purpose-built solutions to simplify operations, ensure compliance, and fuel profitable growth, so they can focus on their clients and do more of the work that matters.

Founded in 2005, 8am™ (formerly AffiniPay) is the professional business platform built to help legal, accounting, and other client-focused professionals run stronger, more profitable businesses. Today, more than 250,000 professionals across the U.S. trust 8am to help them work smarter, serve clients better, and unlock their full potential. We have been recognized as one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies in the U.S. for 13 years in a row, and as a result, our teams continue to grow as well!

What you'll do:

Customer Advocacy & Technical Excellence

• Champion the customer experience at every stage of development, viewing deliverables through the customer's lens
• Design and execute comprehensive test strategies across UI, API, and database layers, ensuring they reflect real customer scenarios
• Speak up when features aren't complete enough to test or when quality concerns arise—even if it means slowing down
• Challenge requirements that don't serve customer needs and identify issues that could frustrate users before they reach production
• Write high-quality test cases that tell a story about customer interactions and maintain them through their entire lifecycle
• Identify and document defects with comprehensive root cause analysis, always including "how this affects the customer" assessments
• Drive continuous improvement in our Defect Leakage Rate (≤15% target), recognizing that every bug reaching production erodes customer trust

Leadership & Execution

• Complete 90%+ of assigned tasks independently while providing guidance and mentorship to junior engineers
• Own quality initiatives and drive measurable improvements to QE processes and standards
• Create and lead test plan reviews using test management tools like TestRail or Qase, ensuring adherence to documented standards
• Engage with Product Owners and Product Management on feature feasibility, testability, and requirement clarification
• Become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for specific technical areas or product components
• Track and report on Quality KPIs, with particular focus on Defect Leakage Rate—our primary customer-focused metric that measures bugs caught by QE versus those found by customers
• Collaborate with SDET team/Developers on determining what tests are high value for automation, and ensuring that test automation operates as expected, owning automated test execution.  
• It is expected that the engineer in this role will proactively communicate any feature changes that may break existing automation to SDET team/Developers to resolve via ticketing system, and remove those tests from running prior to failures.
• Dev owns automation on some teams, SDET team on others

Technical Proficiency

• Demonstrate proficient to advanced networking and Linux skills, utilizing command-line tools across common distributions
• Leverage Python scripting for assisting with test automation tasks as necessary (Dedicated SDET team owns framework and most automation tasks).  Willingness to learn basic Python scripting if not previously leveraged
• Validate services deployed on AWS and other cloud platforms, managing test environments and cloud resources efficiently
• Basic understanding of security and performance testing 

Collaboration & Communication

• Work effectively within scrum team, and across them when user features span teams, contributing meaningfully to technical discussions
• Translate technical issues into customer experience impacts for both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Provide timely, helpful feedback to peers and junior engineers through code reviews and test case audits
• Actively contribute to team knowledge sharing through documentation and presentations
• Participate in all Agile ceremonies with a focus on quality advocacy

About you:

• 3-7 years of experience in software quality engineering, preferably in SaaS environments
• Strong demonstrated proficiency in Linux distributions and CLI-based testing, including log file analysis, and other troubleshooting tasks
• Experience with AWS or other major cloud platforms
• Basic Python/Shell (or similar) scripting knowledge with ability to edit existing scripts and create new automation
• Advanced skills with UI, API, and SQL testing methodologies
• Familiarity with test management tools such as TestRail or Qase
• Demonstrated experience leveraging Version Control Systems with a focus on Github and Bitbucket
• Experience with testing tools: Jira, Sentry, DataDog
• Understanding of containerization, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, CircleCI)
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum methodologies
• Proven track record of mentoring junior engineers and contributing to process improvements
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities
• Strong communication skills with ability to present to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Most importantly: The courage to be vocal about quality concerns and testing impediments
• This position is preferably based in Austin, Texas.

Nice to Have: 

• Experience testing FinTech, payments, or SaaS products in regulated industries (i.e. PCI-compliant) 
• Previous experience testing products using event-driven architecture using message queues (i.e. Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Knowledge of basic nonfunctional testing (security, performance, accessibility) 
• Experience with microservices architectures and distributed systems
• Certifications such as ISTQB or CSTE
• Familiarity with AI-assisted testing tools and leveraging LLMs as a productivity boosting tool
• Experience evaluating and implementing new QE tools and processes

Why 8am: 

At 8am, our culture is shaped by the people who bring it to life every day. Together, we build a company rooted in continuous learning, genuine community, holistic wellness, and meaningful engagement—values that empower us as individuals and unite us as a team. Our culture is grounded in our core values: Work Smart, Win Fast; Outshine Ordinary, and We Find a Way. These values drive how we serve our customers and work with each other in a collaborative, inspiring, and empowering environment, every day.

Here’s how we support our 8Team:

• Health Insurance Coverage: We offer our 8Team a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit your needs, including a 100% company-paid HDHP plan for employees.
• Financial perks: We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package including annual bonuses, equity options and 401(k) or RRSP if in Canada, with a company match for all team members.
• Time for what matters: Flexible Time Off, paid holidays, and a parental leave program for our new parents.
• Wellness: Wellness stipends, mental health support, and one-on-one nutrition coaching.
• Learning and Development: Continuous learning through 8am.edu, leadership programs, professional development funds, and individually focused talent development.
• Giving back to the communities around us: Participate in our charitable matching gift program, paid time off for volunteer service, and company-sponsored volunteer events (both local and virtually).
• Engagement: Virtual and in-person team-building events, quarterly award recognition through our Rise & Shine Award of Excellence Program, and our peer-to-peer appreciation platform.

At 8am, we don’t just offer benefits - we create an environment where people can thrive, grow, and make a real impact every day.

Diversity, equity & inclusion at 8am:

At 8am, we recognize that innovation occurs with a strong team of people who are diverse in background, personality, talent and ideas. Experience comes in many forms and ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace where we continue to learn from each other is an integral part of our culture. We are committed to creating a welcoming and transparent environment for all that embraces those differences through education, equal access to opportunities and information, inclusionary programs, and community outreach. 

Security advisory:

Our hiring teams at 8am are dedicated to recruiting top talent that share our passion for serving the professional services industry through innovative financial technology.  As such, our Talent Acquisition Team only follows legitimate hiring practices.  We will always communicate with our candidates using emails with the 8am domain and will never ask for sensitive/personal data during the application process.  All interviews take place over phone call, Zoom/Google Meet or in person.  All offers are communicated verbally by our Talent Acquisition Specialists with a written offer letter as a follow up.