Senior QA Automation Engineer (Java)

About
Binariks is looking for a highly motivated and skilled Senior QA Automation Engineer (Java).
About the project: a UK-based FinTech company specializing in payment gateway solutions for African markets. The company focuses on secure, scalable, and high-performance transaction processing, leveraging a modern cloud-native microservices architecture. With a strong emphasis on banking expansion, they are developing new financial channels to enhance system interactivity. 
Their tech stack includes Java, MySQL, RPC, Kubernetes, AWS, Kafka, and S3. The team tackles challenges related to complex transaction systems, high-performance databases, and seamless banking integrations, ensuring reliability and innovation in financial services.

Position overview 
Embedded in a small product team while remaining a member of the central QA team, the QA engineer participates in early product discovery, shapes the definition of "done" before development begins, and ensures all validation tests are integrated into the shared automation framework for universal execution.


What We’re Looking For:

• 4+ years of experience in Quality Assurance with hands-on test automation (Java)
• Experience in building and maintaining automated UI and API tests
• Ability to read and understand application code
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, including test integration and fail-closed configurations
• Daily experience using AI coding assistants (preferably Claude Code) for test automation, maintenance, and investigation, with full ownership of the output
• Product engineer mindset: understanding feature purpose and challenging unclear or contradictory requirements early
• Proactiveness in identifying unstated gaps, edge cases, and risks
• Ability to work without daily supervision, clearly report testing status, and raise blockers promptly
• Excellent written and spoken English communication skills (at least B2 level)
• Strong collaboration skills and eagerness to work closely with developers and product managers
• Openness to test code reviews and continuous improvement of technical and soft skills

Will be a plus:

• Experience with performance or security testing
• Work experience in the Fintech domain
  
  

Your Responsibilities:

• Join product and engineering conversations from the first draft of an epic. Ask how it will be tested, which edge cases matter and what could go wrong in production, before the story is written
• Turn features into clear, well-structured test cases: happy paths, edge cases, failure modes
• Automate them in the QA team's shared framework, following its conventions and being reviewed by its maintainers
• Test early on on-demand environments and developers' demos, so misunderstandings surface before code review
• Use AI coding assistants to draft and extend test suites, analyse logs and data through our internal read-only tooling, and speed up bug hunting. Own the outcome: a generated test you have not read and understood is not a test
• Hunt bugs, report them precisely, and see them through to a fix and a regression test. Help build and maintain regression suites, CI test gates and test reporting, and keep the pipeline honest so a failed suite can never pass
• Take part in release management for the team: decide with the team what goes into a release, run the regression gate on the release candidate, and give the go or no-go
• Take part in the central QA team's knowledge sessions and process improvements, and support other teams when needed