Senior Quality Engineer

Job description

**About StarRez** StarRez is the global leader in student housing software, providing innovative solutions for on and off-campus housing management, resident wellness and experience, and revenue generation. Trusted by 1,400+ clients across 25+ countries, StarRez supports more than 4 million beds annually with its user-friendly, all-in-one platform, delivering seamless experiences for students and administrators. With offices in the United States, Australia, the UK, and India, StarRez blends the robust capabilities of a global organization with the personalized care and service of a trusted partner. **Role:** Payments is one of the highest stakes domains at StarRez. When a student pays their housing fees, or an institution reconciles a semester of revenue, the transaction must be correct, traceable, and secure, every time. There is no acceptable margin for a payment that is taken twice, refunded to the wrong account, or lost between our platform and a payment provider. As a Senior Quality Analyst on the Payments team, you will own quality for the systems that process card and bank payments, integrate with payment gateways and providers, and handle authorisation, capture, settlement, refunds, and chargebacks. You will be the person on the team with the deepest understanding of how money moves through our platform, the happy paths, the failure modes, and the states in between. This is a hands on individual contributor role based in Hyderabad, working within a globally distributed engineering organisation spanning India, Australia, the UK and the United States. You will not manage people. You will set the quality bar for your team, do the work to hold it, and coach the engineers, product managers and designers around you to share ownership of it. You will report to the Director of Quality and work day to day with your team's Engineering Manager, Product Manager and engineers, alongside Support and Implementation Services when payment issues reach customers. **What You Will Own:** - Own the end to end test strategy for the Payments product team, deciding what gets tested manually, what gets automated, at which layer, and why, based on the risk each area carries. - Design and execute validation for payment flows including authorisation, capture, settlement, partial and full refunds, failed and retried transactions, chargebacks, idempotency, and reconciliation between our records and the provider's. - Advocate and support building and maintenance of automated coverage across UI, API and service layers, and keep it trustworthy. - Validate integrations with third party payment gateways and providers, including sandbox behaviour, webhook and callback handling, timeout and partial failure scenarios, and provider side error handling. - Engage from discovery and refinement onward: challenge assumptions, surface missing scenarios, and make sure acceptance criteria are specific and testable before a story is picked up. - Assess your team's current quality maturity honestly, build a plan to lift it over the next two to three quarters, and share what you learn with Senior QAs on other teams facing the same gaps. - Coach engineers on testing principles, test design, and shared ownership of automated tests, the goal is a team that builds quality in, not a QA who inspects for it. - Mentor mid level QA engineers on risk assessment, automation, observability and shift left practice. - Contribute to CI/CD pipeline health and deployment quality gates: test suite selection, environment readiness, pre and post deploy checks, and safe release strategies including feature flags and staged rollout. - Own production defect triage for Payments: assess customer and financial impact, distinguish severity from priority, drive fixes at the right urgency, and follow through to root cause and prevention. - Represent Payments quality in incident reviews and, where needed, in conversations with Support and customer facing teams. **Required Qualifications:** - 5+ years in quality engineering or software engineering with a deep focus on quality, in complex distributed system environments. - Hands on experience testing web based SaaS products across front end behaviour, APIs, service integrations, and end to end functional flows. - Experience with transactional or financially sensitive systems, payments, billing, banking, e-commerce checkout, ledger or reconciliation systems, or similar. You understand why correctness, idempotency and auditability matter more here than elsewhere. - Experience building test automation frameworks from the ground up using tools such as Playwright, Cypress or equivalent, including test design, maintainability, and knowing what should not be automated. - Practical experience integrating automated tests and quality checks into CI/CD pipelines using GitHub, Buildkite, or similar platforms. - Experience contributing to deployment and release quality gates, including test suite selection and environment readiness checks. - Ability to translate customer needs into well defined user stories, acceptance criteria, and risk based test scenarios in collaboration with cross functional teams. - Strong root cause analysis and problem solving skills across complex, multi system failures. - Excellent technical communication, you influence engineers, product managers and business stakeholders through evidence and expertise rather than authority. - Practical experience using AI in modern software development, with sound judgement about where it helps and where it does not. - Genuine curiosity about product architecture, customer workflows, and the business impact of engineering decisions. **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience testing payment gateway or provider integrations (e.g. Stripe, or similar). - Familiarity with payment rail nuances, ACH, SEPA, BACS, or card networks, and how timing and compliance rules affect testing. - Exposure to feature flag based or staged rollout strategies for releasing payment features safely. - Experience validating reconciliation between internal records and a provider's settlement data. **Reasons to join our team:** - Opportunity to be a part of a well-established, high-performance company that has been in business for over 30+ years - Full benefits including health care, paid time off, and others - A supportive team environment with emphasis on learning and development opportunities - Our Promise: You will learn, grow, and be appreciated for your impact and contributions. - Z-Factor: Our most celebrated value, you will work with a team of caring, high-performing, and passionate people who have fun supporting our vision, innovation, and continuous improvement. Even if you don't have all of the Qualifications listed above, but feel you have what it takes to succeed in the role, we would love to hear from you! StarRez is an equal opportunity employer.