Nirmitee.io is looking for a strong Senior QA Engineer who can establish and operate a reliable quality gate across multiple software projects and products. The person must be equally comfortable with manual testing and automation. They will be responsible for understanding business requirements, identifying gaps before development, creating test coverage, automating critical workflows and providing clear release recommendations. This is not a test-execution-only role. The QA Engineer will be expected to challenge unclear requirements, identify business and technical risks, improve development processes and prevent unstable releases from reaching customers. ## Key Responsibilities ### Quality Ownership * Own end-to-end quality across assigned projects and releases. * Define and enforce entry and exit criteria for each release. * Provide a clear Go, Conditional Go or No-Go recommendation. * Prevent releases when critical workflows are untested or high-risk defects remain unresolved. * Maintain visibility of release risks, open defects, test coverage and quality status. * Act as a strong quality gate between development, staging and production. ### Requirement and Design Review * Participate in requirement, product, design and technical discussions. * Identify missing scenarios, unclear requirements and edge cases before development begins. * Convert business requirements into testable acceptance criteria. * Challenge assumptions where business workflows, user behaviour or failure scenarios have not been considered. * Ensure every feature includes positive, negative, boundary, permission and failure-handling scenarios. ### Manual Testing * Perform functional, integration, regression, exploratory and end-to-end testing. * Validate workflows across different roles, permissions, browsers, devices and data conditions. * Test validations, error handling, concurrency, data integrity and recovery scenarios. * Reproduce production issues and support root-cause analysis. * Maintain reusable test cases, test evidence and regression suites. * Test third-party integrations and complete business workflows. ### Automation Testing * Design, build and maintain scalable automation frameworks. * Automate critical user journeys, APIs and high-risk regression scenarios. * Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. * Ensure automation failures provide useful logs, screenshots, videos and error details. * Identify and fix flaky tests. * Select automation candidates based on risk, business criticality and execution frequency. * Maintain reliable smoke, sanity and regression automation suites. ### API and Database Validation * Test REST APIs, authentication, authorisation, validations, error responses and integrations. * Validate request and response schemas and business rules. * Perform database validation using SQL. * Verify data consistency across UI, APIs, databases and third-party systems. * Test duplicate requests, retries, timeouts, idempotency and partial failures. ### Defect Management * Report defects with clear reproduction steps, evidence, business impact and severity. * Lead defect triage with engineering, business analysis and project teams. * Distinguish release blockers from lower-priority defects. * Verify fixes and conduct impact-based regression testing. * Analyse escaped defects and introduce preventive test coverage. * Ensure recurring defects are addressed through process or automation improvements. Requirements ## Mandatory Skills * 5–8 years of software quality assurance experience. * Strong hands-on experience in both manual and automation testing. * Experience with Playwright, Cypress or Selenium. * Strong API testing experience using Postman, REST Assured or equivalent tools. * Good SQL and database validation skills. * Experience testing complex web applications and role-based workflows. * Experience with Git and CI/CD tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI or Azure DevOps. * Ability to independently understand a business workflow and prepare a complete test strategy. * Strong exploratory testing and defect investigation skills. * Ability to communicate quality risks clearly and firmly. * Experience working in Agile software development teams. * Ability to manage quality across multiple projects or modules. ## Preferred Skills * Experience testing React, Node.js, MERN, Python, Django or Java-based applications. * Experience with JavaScript or TypeScript-based automation. * Basic performance testing experience using JMeter, k6 or equivalent tools. * Understanding of security testing, including authentication, authorisation, session handling and common web vulnerabilities. * Experience testing webhooks, asynchronous processes and third-party integrations. * Experience with cloud-based applications on AWS, Azure or GCP. * Experience testing containerised and microservices-based applications. * Experience establishing QA processes within a growing IT services or product engineering company. * Experience working directly with clients and distributed development teams. Benefits Before recommending a production release, the Senior QA Engineer must verify that: 1. Requirements and acceptance criteria have been reviewed and tested. 2. Critical business workflows have passed. 3. API, UI and database behaviour are consistent. 4. Role and permission scenarios have been validated. 5. Negative, boundary and failure scenarios have been covered. 6. Critical automated regression tests have passed. 7. No unresolved blocker or critical defects remain. 8. High-severity defects have documented business acceptance. 9. Required logs, monitoring and error handling are available. 10. Rollback and production validation steps are defined. 11. Test evidence and release notes are available. 12. Known risks are clearly communicated to all relevant stakeholders.