Quality Assurance Engineer

About the Client Our client is a globally diversified investment organization focused on long-term, value-driven investment strategies. General Information The position is open to full-time candidates with excellent communication skills to work on-site in Abu Dhabi (UAE) or remotely within 3h of the Abu Dhabi time zone (within 3h of UTC+4). Tasks and Deliverables Lead, design, and build end-to-end quality for Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), low-latency platform built on Solace messaging, and Azure (AKS). You will own the test strategy, plan, automation framework, CI/CD pipelines, and compliance testing. The role is hands-on and leadership-oriented: you will set standards, coach engineers, and deliver audit-ready evidence for regulated markets. Responsibilities Own test automation strategy & governance Define a shift-left test strategy across unit, integration, contract, E2E, performance, security, and resiliency. Establish quality gates (defects, coverage, flakiness budgets, performance SLOs) and release criteria. Shift left testing: requirements → tests → results → evidence traceability model. Build a reusable automation framework Architect a test framework packaged for reuse across CEE teams. Provide libraries/utilities for API, Solace messaging, database, and contract testing. Standardize test data management, deterministic fixtures, and parallel/ephemeral execution patterns. Event-driven architecture (EDA) testing Validate producer/consumer contracts, schema evolution, and topic compatibility. Assert ordering, idempotency, exactly/at-least/at-most-once semantics, replay, DLQ handling, and deduplicate keys. Prove back-pressure, throttling, and consumer lag behavior under bursty market loads; chaos test broker clusters. Enforce schema/contract gates in CI/CD; prevent breaking changes before promote. Data-platform & reconciliation QA Automate data quality checks for market/reference data, order/trade states, and downstream stores (SQL Server/Azure SQL). Implement reconciliation across OMS/EMS, risk, and settlement; verify lineage and PII/PCI masking where relevant. Use SQL and profiling to validate accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and SCD/versioned data behaviors. Manage golden datasets and synthetic market data at scale for repeatable regression. Pipelines, environments & observability Embed suites in Azure DevOps (build → deploy → smoke → regression → perf/security) with mandatory gates (coverage, static analysis, compliance, performance). Orchestrate tests on AKS with Docker/Kubernetes, ephemeral environments. Validate OpenTelemetry to correlate trace IDs across services; validate Application Insights/Dynatrace signals in assertions. Performance & security Baseline latency/throughput; run JMeter/LoadRunner for spike/soak/failover; collaborate on capacity tuning. Automate OWASP checks (ZAP), enforce SAST/DAST and dependency scanning (Snyk) with remediation gating. Leadership & operations Lead QA activities in the project, mentor developers on testability and quality by design. Contribute to incident response, RCA, production canary/verification suites, and reliability playbooks. Tech Stack Focus Languages/Frameworks: C#, Python, xUnit, PyTest, Pact, Docker, Testing: xUnit, NUnit, MSTest, Pact.NET , Moq/AutoFixture, TestContainers-style patterns APIs/Messaging: REST/GraphQL/SOAP, Solace (preferred), RabbitMQ or Kafka (plus) Data: SQL Server, Azure SQL; strong SQL for validation/migrations; data profiling tools Cloud/Infra: Azure, AKS, Docker/Kubernetes; Terraform/Bicep/ARM CI/CD & Quality: Azure DevOps, Git/Azure Repos, coverage/linters, policy-driven gates Perf/Sec/Obs: JMeter/LoadRunner, OWASP ZAP, Snyk, Application Insights, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry Secrets: Azure Key Vault (Nice) FIX conformance via QuickFIX/N simulators; schema registry tooling Additional Details Location: Abu Dhabi (UAE) or remote within 3h of Abu Dhabi time zone Work model: Onsite in Abu Dhabi or remote within 3h of Abu Dhabi time zone Type: 40h/week Contract Duration: 6-12 months initially, with long-term engagement potential Authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work in their country of residence without employer sponsorship Required Experience 8+ years in QA/engineering with 5+ in financial/trading systems (order lifecycle, market data, risk controls) Proven delivery of pipeline-integrated .NET automation frameworks and regulated-market audits Deep understanding of EDA QA (contracts, ordering, idempotency, replay, DLQs, back-pressure) and data-quality/reconciliation Hands-on with Azure/AKS, Azure DevOps, and performance/security automation at scale Clear communicator; able to lead cross-functional quality initiatives and coach engineers Strong English proficiency required Bonus Experience ISTQB Advanced/CSTE, Azure Fundamentals / Azure DevOps Engineer Finance certs (CFA/FRM), Agile/Scrum experience