Test Architect Director - BPL

Provide strategic and execution oversight for the test strategies across payments shifting from a more traditional QA model to a quality assist model (QA+). In doing so, we establish automated controls and governance as part of delivery, developer owned quality, AI driven capabilities to remove the test burden on teams, and self healing.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the end to end test strategy across merchant onboarding, payments processing, settlement, and reporting
• Architect scalable quality assist approach to testing where all controls are automated as part of CI/CD pipelines
• Embed quality engineering practices into product teams (shift left, shift right, continuous testing)
• Ensure regulatory and scheme compliance validation (e.g., PCI DSS, PSD2, card scheme rules)
• Lead non functional testing strategy (performance, resilience, security, failover, high volume transaction handling)
• Drive test data management and synthetic data strategies for sensitive financial data
• Determine and oversee AI assisted testing and verification (e.g., requirements validation, test generation, fault classification)
• Drive and oversee testability requirements across internal and third party vendor, such as test environments and SLAs
• Provide governance, metrics, and reporting on quality risk, coverage, and release readiness

Essential Skills

• Deep experience in payments architecture (authorization, clearing, settlement, chargebacks, fraud flows)
• Strong expertise in API and event driven testing (REST, webhooks, Kafka/message queues)
• Proven track record in test automation architecture (e.g., Selenium, Playwright, REST Assured, Cypress)
• Experience with cloud native platforms (AWS/Azure), microservices, and containerized environments
• Solid understanding of CI/CD and DevOps tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, pipelines as code)
• Knowledge of performance testing at scale (e.g., JMeter, Gatling) for high TPS payment systems
• Strong data validation and reconciliation testing across financial ledgers
• Ability to define and track quality metrics, SLOs, and risk based testing strategies
• Leadership skills to influence engineering, product, and risk stakeholders
• Exposure to AI/ML in quality engineering (test generation, anomaly detection, LLM based validation)

Desirable Skills

• Experience in merchant acquiring platforms (POS, e commerce gateways, omnichannel payments)
• Knowledge of open banking / APIs and real time payments (e.g., Faster Payments, SEPA Instant)
• Familiarity with contract testing and service virtualization (e.g., Pact, WireMock)
• Understanding of fraud detection systems and risk scoring models
• Exposure to data platforms and analytics (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery) for quality insights
• Prior experience in regulated financial environments with audit and compliance requirements
• Contributions to test standards, frameworks, or thought leadership