QA engineer (auto) in load testing

You will work as part of the engineering team and collaborate directly with the Backend Tech Lead, developers, the product team, and the CDO. We expect you to work independently within a structured Scrum process and take responsibility for product quality throughout the entire lifecycle of a change—from requirements analysis to validating the result in production.

• Analyse requirements, designs, and technical solutions before development begins; proactively identify ambiguities, risks, and conditions that cannot be properly tested.
• Design testing strategies and test scenarios for new and existing functionality, including functional, integration, regression, negative, and exploratory testing.
• Test backend services and REST APIs, including authentication, validation, error handling, edge cases, idempotency, and interactions between services.
• Validate data at the API, database, log, and external integration levels rather than relying solely on the user interface.
• Prepare and maintain test data, test environments, and request collections for reproducible testing.
• Document defects so that the team can reproduce them quickly, including preconditions, steps, actual and expected results, requests and responses, logs, and the impact on users or business processes.
• Perform smoke and regression testing before releases and participate in decisions regarding release readiness.
• Verify fixes in staging, monitor results after deployment to production, and participate in incident and root cause analysis.
• Establish an approach to load testing for critical APIs and business scenarios based on realistic system usage patterns.
• Select and implement an appropriate tool, such as k6, Gatling, JMeter, or Locust, based on project requirements and team capabilities.
• Design load, stress, spike, and soak testing scenarios; configure virtual users, ramp-up periods, request rates, and test duration.
• Define measurable success criteria, including throughput, error rate, average response time, p90, p95, p99, system stability, and acceptable levels of performance degradation.
• Distinguish limitations of the test environment and load generator from limitations of the system itself to ensure that results are interpreted correctly.
• Analyse results together with developers using application, database, and infrastructure logs and metrics; document conclusions, identified bottlenecks, and recommendations.
• Ensure that load tests are reproducible and can be executed in a controlled manner locally, through CI/CD, or on a dedicated runner.
• Use Playwright to automate repetitive checks and prepare a foundation for future REST API test automation.
• Determine which scenarios should be automated based on risk, execution frequency, feature stability, and maintenance cost.
• Write readable and maintainable tests, extract reusable logic, manage environment configuration and secrets, and prepare independent test data.
• Store test code and configuration in Git, work through GitHub Pull Requests, and participate in test code reviews.
• Integrate automated checks and reports into GitHub Actions as the automation suite develops.
• Participate in sprint planning, daily stand-ups, refinement sessions, and retrospectives; communicate risks, blockers, and estimate changes in advance.
• Contribute to the definition of Acceptance Criteria, Definition of Ready, and Definition of Done, ensuring that requirements are unambiguous and testable.
• Collaborate with developers when investigating defects and debugging issues, providing specific technical evidence instead of general problem descriptions.
• Keep test documentation, checklists, scenario collections, execution instructions, and quality reports up to date.
• Propose improvements to the product, test infrastructure, and engineering processes, and drive agreed improvements through to implementation.

• 4+ years of professional experience testing web applications and backend systems, including experience at Senior level or independently owning a quality assurance area.
• Strong understanding of test design techniques, risk-based testing, and regression suite development.
• Solid experience testing REST APIs, including HTTP methods and status codes, HTTP headers, cookies, JSON, multipart/form-data, authentication, pagination, and error handling.
• Hands-on experience with Postman, curl, or similar tools for API investigation and manual testing.
• Hands-on experience building load tests using at least one of the following tools: k6, Gatling, JMeter, or Locust.
• Ability to design load profiles and analyse latency, throughput, error rate, p90, p95, and p99 metrics; understanding of the differences between load, stress, spike, and soak testing.
• Experience with Playwright, with the ability to independently write, debug, and maintain API or end-to-end test scenarios.
• Basic programming skills in TypeScript or JavaScript.
• Solid SQL skills, including preparing and validating test data, reading queries, and verifying database state.
• Experience reading logs and using trace IDs or correlation IDs to track requests across services.
• Experience with Git and GitHub, including branches, commits, Pull Requests, resolving basic conflicts, and participating in code reviews.
• Understanding of Docker and CI/CD, with the ability to run a test environment or test suite locally and investigate pipeline failures.
• Ability to clearly communicate defects, risks, and test results to both developers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Languages: English (B2) / Russian (B2)
• Будет плюсом: Experience testing high-load systems, payment flows, or critical external integrations; Experience with Grafana, Kibana, Sentry, Prometheus, ClickHouse, or similar observability tools; Experience analysing MySQL or MariaDB performance and understanding how queries, indexes, and locks affect API response times; Experience in telecommunications, eSIM, or SaaS products; Knowledge of API security fundamentals, including secret management, rate limiting, access control, and the OWASP API Security Top 10; Knowledge of ISO 27001 or experience working in an environment with enhanced security requirements; Experience configuring tests and publishing reports in GitHub Actions

• Ownership of complex features and components from day one.
• Ownership of the quality and performance testing direction.
• Autonomy in establishing the load testing practice and selecting a practical approach to test automation.
• Direct collaboration with the Backend Tech Lead and CDO - your conclusions and recommendations will contribute to technical and product decisions.
• An opportunity to contribute to the development of our engineering culture, testing tools, and product delivery processes.