Toptal: 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, , 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