Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering

Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering (SDET)

Location: Remote

Type: Full-time

Regions: Europe, UAE/Dubai and Asia

Working hours: Flexible — no fixed schedule

Relocation: Not required
Salary Open based on experience- please do apply if you believe you met the criteria but are outside this range

> Please note: we are not currently hiring for this role from US time zones, Australia, or India.

About the Company

We are building a next-generation onchain exchange designed for high-performance, institutional-grade trading while remaining accessible to a broader market.

The platform includes a fully onchain order book, custom state-transition logic and purpose-built infrastructure designed around low-latency, high-throughput execution.

We are now hiring our first dedicated Quality Engineer / SDET.

There is no established QA system waiting for you.

You will build it.

The Role

As Senior Software Engineer, Quality Engineering, you will own the engineering foundations of quality across the platform.

This is not a manual QA role and we are not looking for someone whose experience is primarily writing test cases against an existing framework.

You will decide:

• What needs to be tested first
• Which critical trading paths require the strongest coverage
• What belongs in unit, integration, contract, API and end-to-end testing
• What should run on every pull request versus nightly
• How test data and environments should work
• How AI can improve test generation, maintenance and failure analysis
• How quality engineering should evolve as the platform approaches production

Initially, you will be the only dedicated QA/SDET engineer, working directly with Backend, Frontend, Blockchain and Infrastructure engineers.

The quality engineering team is expected to grow to approximately 2–3 people as the platform scales.

A public testnet is targeted for the end of the year, with the initial objective of establishing robust coverage across approximately 20–30% of the platform's most critical trading paths.

What You'll Do

Build Quality Engineering From Zero

• Design and implement the company's initial quality engineering architecture.
• Determine testing priorities across a complex trading platform.
• Build reusable automation frameworks, libraries, fixtures and tooling.
• Establish strategies across unit, API, integration, contract and E2E testing.
• Build reliable test-data generation and management systems.
• Create testing standards that other engineers can use easily.
• Continuously improve developer experience around testing and quality.

Test Trading Systems

Trading experience is the most important requirement for this role.

You will:

• Validate order placement, modification and cancellation.
• Test multiple order types and execution scenarios.
• Validate order matching and matching-engine behaviour.
• Test fills, partial fills and failed executions.
• Verify routing and execution paths.
• Test fee calculations and settlement logic.
• Validate behaviour during volatile or unusual market conditions.
• Identify edge cases specific to exchange infrastructure.
• Ensure consistency between frontend behaviour, backend state and onchain state.
• Build regression protection around critical trading flows.

You should already understand how exchanges work from a testing perspective rather than needing to learn the fundamentals after joining.

AI-Native Quality Engineering

We expect AI to be part of your daily engineering workflow.

This is not simply about testing AI features.

We want someone actively using modern AI tools to improve how software is tested and shipped.

You may use AI for:

• Automated test generation.
• Identifying missing coverage.
• Generating edge cases.
• Test maintenance.
• Code generation.
• Failure analysis.
• Root-cause investigation.
• Regression analysis.
• Log analysis.
• Developer tooling.
• Documentation.
• Test-data generation.

You should be able to explain specifically which AI tools you use, how you use them and what they helped you accomplish recently.

Candidates who actively avoid AI-assisted engineering workflows are unlikely to be a fit.

Automation & CI/CD

You will:

• Build automated test suites covering APIs, backend services, frontend applications and onchain interactions.
• Integrate testing deeply into CI/CD.
• Define quality gates for pull requests and deployments.
• Decide which tests run on each PR versus scheduled/nightly pipelines.
• Optimize execution using parallelization, caching and intelligent test selection.
• Reduce flaky testing and improve feedback times.
• Build containerized testing environments using Docker.
• Help establish an automation-first engineering culture.

APIs & Distributed Systems

The platform relies on multiple communication protocols and distributed components.

You should be comfortable testing:

• REST APIs
• JSON-RPC
• WebSockets
• Asynchronous services
• Real-time event-driven systems
• Databases
• Blockchain interactions
• Frontend/backend state synchronization

You should be comfortable debugging failures across multiple parts of a distributed architecture rather than treating each component in isolation.

Performance & Reliability

You will also help validate how the platform behaves under real-world trading conditions.

This includes:

• Load testing.
• Stress testing.
• Endurance testing.
• High-throughput transaction testing.
• Latency testing.
• Network interruption scenarios.
• Timeouts.
• Service degradation.
• Infrastructure failures.
• Recovery behaviour.
• Concurrency and race conditions.

Experience with tools such as k6, Artillery, Gatling or Locust is useful.

Your First 30 Days

We expect you to independently assess the platform and establish the initial quality engineering roadmap.

That will include:

• Understanding the architecture and trading flows.
• Mapping critical user and execution paths.
• Identifying the highest-risk areas.
• Determining what should and should not be tested initially.
• Designing the first automation framework.
• Establishing CI testing.
• Building initial exchange regression coverage.
• Defining testing environments and test-data strategy.
• Introducing AI-assisted quality workflows.
• Creating a roadmap toward public testnet readiness.

You will not be handed a predefined QA strategy.

Creating it is part of the job.

Required Experience

Must-Have

• 3+ years of experience in SDET, Quality Engineering or software engineering with a strong testing focus.
• Hands-on experience testing an exchange or trading system.
• Strong understanding of order types, order lifecycle, matching and trading flows.
• Experience building test systems and automation frameworks from scratch.
• Strong automation engineering skills.
• Experience integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong experience with Docker.
• API testing experience across REST, JSON-RPC and/or WebSockets.
• Comfortable debugging distributed systems.
• Active daily use of AI-assisted engineering tools.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals.
• Ability to operate independently in an early-stage environment.
• Comfortable being the first dedicated QA/SDET engineer and taking ownership without an existing playbook.

Languages

JavaScript / TypeScript is preferred, but strong engineers using other languages will absolutely be considered.

We care more about engineering ability, automation depth and trading-system knowledge than matching an exact language stack.

Nice to Have

• Experience building internal developer-productivity or quality-engineering platforms.
• Testing architecture across API, integration, contract and E2E layers.
• Performance and load testing using k6, Artillery, Gatling, Locust or similar.
• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana or Datadog.
• Kubernetes experience.
• Cloud-native infrastructure experience.
• Complex transactional or financial systems.
• Blockchain or smart-contract testing.
• Onchain trading infrastructure.
• Order books.
• AMMs.
• Liquidity pools.
• Routing and execution systems.
• Testing reliable real-time systems.
• Advanced test-data management.

Who We're Looking For

You are probably a strong fit if you think of yourself as a software engineer specialising in quality, rather than a traditional QA engineer.

You've previously looked at a system with little or no test infrastructure and worked out:

What can break? What matters most? What should we automate first?

You understand that achieving 100% test coverage is not the objective.

You know how to identify the 20% of flows where failure would hurt the platform most and protect those first.

You have enough trading-domain knowledge to challenge engineers on edge cases rather than simply translating requirements into test scripts.

You are comfortable making decisions independently.

And AI is already part of how you engineer software — not something you're waiting for your employer to introduce.

Hiring Process

CVs alone will not determine who progresses.

We care significantly more about how you actually think about testing complex systems than how polished your application looks.

Expect an initial conversation covering topics such as:

• The last test framework you built from scratch.
• What you intentionally chose not to test and why.
• Exchange order types you've personally tested.
• Common failure modes you've encountered in trading systems.
• How you would approach your first 30 days as the only QA engineer.
• How you're currently using AI in your engineering workflow.
• What you believe should run in CI on every PR versus nightly.

If you have a GitHub profile or examples of engineering/tooling work, we'd particularly like to see them.

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to establish the quality engineering function for an ambitious trading platform before the practices and architecture have already been decided for you.

You will have genuine ownership over:

• Testing architecture.
• Automation strategy.
• Developer tooling.
• CI quality gates.
• AI-assisted quality engineering.
• Trading-system validation.
• Testnet readiness.
• Future QA/SDET hiring.

If you enjoy building the systems that allow other engineers to ship faster and more confidently — particularly in complex trading environments — we'd like to speak with you.