QA Chapter Lead

About the role

Watu Credit is hiring a QA Chapter Lead in Nairobi (Westlands). The role combines two tracks: acting as an embedded QA engineer within a squad, and leading the QA chapter across the function. It reports to the Head of Engineering.

Key responsibilities

• Squad QA: attend all ceremonies (sprint planning, daily standup, sprint review, retrospective), define acceptance criteria with the Product Owner, and own the Definition of Done quality gate.
• Write and maintain automated test suites (unit, integration, E2E) and ensure test coverage; nothing ships without passing the quality criteria.
• Define and maintain QA standards: test pyramid, automation tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds and CI gate configuration.
• Onboard new QA engineers, define their onboarding process and baseline expectations.
• Run the monthly QA Guild with the counterpart Chapter Lead to align tooling, frameworks and Definition of Done across engineering.
• Own the automation framework selection and evolution, and maintain documentation anyone can follow.
• Report to the Head of Engineering on coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlog and systemic quality issues.

Required profile

• 5+ years of software QA experience, including at least 2 years in a Lead QA role driving test strategy across more than one team.
• Experience defining and maintaining QA standards in an Agile squad environment.
• Strongly preferred: fintech, payments or digital financial services experience, and performance and load testing experience.
• Mandatory for one of the QA Chapter roles: mobile app testing experience (Android surface).
• Preferred: experience building or evolving a QA chapter, guild or community of practice across multiple teams.

Required skills

• Strong automation engineering skills, with maintainable, readable test suites running reliably in CI.
• API testing at depth: REST, contract testing, integration test design.
• Java-based backend environments: reading Java code and writing tests that match the architecture.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tooling (test case generation, regression triage, synthetic test data via LLMs).