QAE C# - Full Remote Portugal/Spain

ABOUT THE OPPORTUNITY A global technology services organisation is building an enterprise-grade payment gateway from the ground up, and they need a senior automation engineer to own quality across the entire stack. This is a consulting engagement embedded in a cross-functional Scrum team, working in a high-security financial environment where quality is non-negotiable. PROJECT & CONTEXT You'll join a greenfield project building a new payment gateway for an enterprise client — covering the full payment lifecycle: authorisation, capture, settlement, and refunds. The environment is Microsoft-native , with Azure DevOps as the central hub for pipelines, test management, defect tracking, and reporting. This is a technically complex, high-stakes project operating under PCI-DSS compliance requirements. You won't be doing checkbox QA — you'll be designing reusable test frameworks, integrating them into CI/CD pipelines, driving shift-left testing practices, and validating distributed microservices and event-driven architectures. The team runs full Scrum — stand-ups, planning, refinement, retrospectives — and you'll work directly with developers and product owners to shape acceptance criteria and contribute to both the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done from day one. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Test Automation Strong hands-on experience building and maintaining automated test suites for RESTful APIs , integration workflows, and backend microservices Proficiency with SpecFlow (BDD framework — primary) and Selenium for UI/integration test coverage Experience with RestSharp and Postman/Newman for API testing Programming Solid proficiency in C# for writing production-grade automated tests and reusable test framework components Ability to work within a .NET/Microsoft-aligned codebase and understand project structure CI/CD & Tooling Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines , preferably Azure DevOps Pipelines Hands-on use of Azure DevOps for test case management, defect tracking, execution reporting, and dashboards Technical Foundations Solid understanding of REST APIs , JSON/XML data structures, message queues , and event-driven architectures Working knowledge of SQL and data validation techniques Domain Knowledge Experience testing payment systems , financial services platforms, or other high-security transactional environments Understanding of payment lifecycle concepts (authorisation, capture, settlement, refunds) Awareness of PCI-DSS standards and secure testing practices Collaboration & Language Comfortable working in full Agile/Scrum environments — ceremonies, refinement, retrospectives Strong communication skills — able to engage with both technical and non-technical stakeholders English B2 Upper-Intermediate minimum (working language) NICE TO HAVE Experience with performance, load, or security testing activities in financial or transactional systems Familiarity with shift-left testing methodologies and embedding quality in early development stages Background in microservices architecture testing at scale Knowledge of secure coding and testing standards beyond PCI-DSS baseline Prior experience in consulting or nearshore delivery environments