Senior Automation Engineer

Ozow is searching for a high-level technical lead to drive the quality assurance and automation strategy for its rapidly evolving payment ecosystem. Based in Cape Town, this role is a key appointment within a company that is currently at the forefront of digital payment innovation in South Africa. The ideal candidate will bridge the gap between high-level architectural strategy and hands-on execution, ensuring the platform remains secure, efficient, and scalable.

About the role

This position is designed for an experienced professional who understands that quality is not just a final gate, but an integral part of the development lifecycle. You will own the automation architecture, effectively setting the standards that guide how the engineering teams approach testing and release confidence. Because the role is full-stack in nature, you will be expected to balance technical oversight—such as mentoring intermediate team members and defining governance—with the day-to-day realities of UI and API automation.

The environment demands a proactive mindset, particularly regarding the integration of AI-assisted testing practices and the maintenance of observable, production-ready quality gates. You will operate at the intersection of business risk and technical implementation, ensuring that critical payment paths, such as reconciliation and settlement, are resilient and well-tested.

Your primary objective is to build and maintain reusable automation frameworks that can handle the complexities of a distributed fintech architecture. Key responsibilities include:

• Leading the design and development of end-to-end automation frameworks using industry-standard tools like Playwright and RestSharp.
• Integrating sophisticated testing suites into existing CI/CD pipelines, specifically utilising TeamCity and Bitbucket.
• Mentoring other QA practitioners and developers to elevate the collective technical capability of the team.
• Designing and implementing performance testing strategies to ensure system stability under heavy transactional loads.
• Applying human-centric exploratory testing to uncover edge cases that automated scripts might miss.
• Defining governance for automation coding standards and ensuring all technical documentation is current and actionable.
• Bridging the gap between manual exploratory work and automated execution to ensure comprehensive test coverage.

What they're looking for

Ozow is seeking a seasoned practitioner who brings substantial depth in quality engineering. You must be comfortable working within a high-stakes environment where transaction integrity is paramount.

• **Experience:** A minimum of five years in a senior automation or quality engineering role, ideally with exposure to fintech, banking, or complex payment systems.
• **Technical Proficiency:** Advanced programming capabilities in C#, Python, or Java. You should be familiar with modern UI/API automation and comfortable working within cloud-native and containerised environments (e.g., AWS, Docker, Kubernetes).
• **Strategic Thinking:** Demonstrated ability to translate business risks into a prioritised automation roadmap.
• **Communication:** Strong interpersonal skills for stakeholder engagement and technical leadership, including the ability to perform peer reviews and provide constructive mentorship.
• **Operational Excellence:** Expertise in observability and logging tools, such as Datadog or Allure, to provide clear metrics on test failure and system health.

For candidates based in South Africa, this role represents a top-tier opportunity within the local fintech sector. Senior-level automation roles in Cape Town’s tech hub typically offer highly competitive remuneration packages, often commensurate with the high level of responsibility required to manage payment-critical architecture. Professionals moving into this space often follow career paths into Lead QA, Software Architecture, or Engineering Management. If you have a background in high-transaction environments and a passion for "shift-left" testing, this is an excellent platform to influence the future of digital finance.

• Relevant tech qualification is preferred, with any additional certification a bonus.
• At least five years of automation and quality-engineering experience in a Senior Automation Engineer, Quality Engineer or comparable role.
• Strong experience designing scalable automation frameworks and modern test architecture.
• Advanced programming capability in C#, Java, Python or a comparable object-oriented language.
• Hands-on expertise with Playwright and modern UI and API automation practices.
• Experience integrating automated testing into TeamCity, Bitbucket pipelines or comparable CI/CD platforms.
• Strong understanding of shift-left testing, distributed systems, microservices, API testing and contract testing.
• Comfort operating as a full-stack quality engineer, combining automation ownership with hands-on manual testing.
• Experience in fintech, banking or payments, including transactional workflows, reconciliation, settlement, payment gateways or orchestration.
• Experience with cloud platforms and container technologies such as AWS, Azure, Docker or Kubernetes.
• Strong troubleshooting, debugging, root-cause analysis, stakeholder engagement and technical mentoring skills.
• Experience with performance testing using k6 or a comparable tool.