Principal QA Engineer
Описание
Coinspaid Dev is an independent engineering unit that advances blockchain infrastructure development. We are looking for a Principal QA Engineer to take ownership of a company-wide QA system and lead its continued development. You will dive into the current processes, leadership model, automation and tooling direction, quality controls, and improvement roadmap; challenge existing approaches where needed, and drive the next stage of maturity across engineering domains. This is a senior individual contributor role working primarily through QA Technical Leads and Senior QA Engineers and partnering with Engineering Managers, Product, Architecture, and DevOps/SRE, while remaining hands-on in high-impact reviews, pilots, and critical investigations.
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of the company-wide Quality Engineering strategy, operating model, and improvement roadmap; continue evolving them as products, risks, and organizational needs change
- Assess Quality Engineering maturity across domains, identify systemic bottlenecks and inconsistencies, and prioritize the improvements with the highest company-wide impact
- Define and evolve cross-domain standards and guardrails for test architecture, coverage, quality evidence, testability, observability, release readiness, and production validation
- Drive continuous improvement of the end-to-end QA process and embed shift-left practices, quality controls, and risk-based gates across the SDLC together with Product, Engineering, Architecture, and DevOps/SRE
- Own the strategic direction of the QA toolchain and automation architecture, and validate key technical decisions hands-on through code, prototypes, and architecture reviews across UI and backend automation. Python is preferred, while Go, Node.js, or another suitable stack is also relevant
- Continuously benchmark market practices and emerging technologies, including AI; validate ideas through experiments and turn successful findings into company-wide transformation initiatives such as framework modernization, contract and performance testing, smarter test selection, and cloud-native test environments. Actively use AI in daily engineering work and advance its adoption across QA
- Define scalable release-quality principles and provide technical recommendations for systemic, cross-team, or ambiguous quality risks
- Lead cross-team investigations and root-cause analysis for critical incidents, unstable environments, systemic automation failures, and quality problems without a clear owner
- Establish meaningful quality metrics and make trends, risks, technical debt, and improvement outcomes visible to engineering leadership
- Develop QA Technical Leads as domain-level technical owners, strengthening their ability to translate company-wide direction into sustainable practices and decisions within their domains
- Influence, align stakeholders, and translate business, regulatory, and operational risks into clear engineering priorities
Requirements
- 8+ years in Quality Assurance / Quality Engineering, including technical leadership across multiple teams or domains
- Experience defining QA strategy, standards, or large-scale transformations with measurable results
- Deep knowledge of Quality practices risk-based testing, coverage strategy, shift-left, quality gates, testability, release readiness, and production quality signals
- Strong hands-on programming experience and the ability to design and contribute to scalable UI and backend automation. Python is preferred, but strong experience with Go, Node.js, or another relevant stack is welcome
- Strong experience with distributed backend systems, REST APIs, event-driven workflows, third-party integrations
- Experience with CI/CD, Docker/Kubernetes, cloud-native or GitOps environments, and observability tools
- Ability to define useful quality metrics, communicate technical risk, and influence senior stakeholders
- A research-driven mindset, practical experience evaluating new technologies, and confident, responsible, and active use of AI tools in everyday engineering work
- Good spoken and written English and Russian
Nice to have
- Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, compliance, financial operations, or another regulated domain with complex integrations and high operational risk
- Experience with Kafka, MQ, Debezium, ledger-like systems, eventual consistency, and event-driven architecture
- Experience with contract, performance, load, resilience, or reliability testing
We offer
- Flexible benefits up to 230 EUR/month for sports, mental health, coworking, home office, or medical expenses
- Fully remote work from almost anywhere
- Optional offices and relocation support
- Flexible, async-friendly environment
- Budget for courses, certifications, and professional development
- Language learning support
- Cross-team learning and knowledge sharing
- Medical insurance or reimbursement depending on location
- Access to mental health support
- Financial support for important life events
- Merch shop with rewards system
- Team offsites and company events