Automation QA Engineer

At PLANEKS, we believe people do their best work when they have the freedom to grow. We build a culture where talented professionals can focus on meaningful work, grow continuously, and see the results of their contributions.

What We Offer

• 100% remote work opportunity and flexitime - choose working hours between 8:00-20:00 Kyiv time
• Personal Growth Budget in USD (Travel, Health & Psychotherapy, Sports, Education & Training, Software, Work Equipment).
• Competitive compensation in USD with regular salary reviews.
• Paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave.
• Continuous professional growth through mentorship, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• English Speaking Club with a native speaker.
• Access to AI tools, including coding assistants for engineers and LLM subscriptions for non-technical specialists.
• Transparent processes, flat management structure, and a supportive team culture.

About the Role

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)  to take ownership of test automation and software quality across our engineering team.

As the first SDET, you will build the test framework, define the testing strategy, and integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. You will work closely with the VP of Engineering, Staff Engineers, and the infrastructure team to help developers ship software faster and with confidence.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on making automated testing reliable and an integral part of the development process.

About Project

The project is a hospitality technology platform that helps restaurants, hotels, and coffee shops manage tip pooling, instant tip payouts, cashless tip distribution, reporting, compliance, labor costs, purchases, sales forecasting, and payroll.

The platform handles financial transactions where reliability and accuracy are critical. The engineering team is building the next generation of the platform and increasing release frequency. Reliable automated testing is essential to prevent regressions and ensure critical financial workflows function correctly.

The team works remotely across Canada, Japan, and Europe and follows two-week sprints.

Required Hard Skills

• Substantial experience building and owning test automation for a production web product.
• Strong engineering skills. The technology stack includes Python and Django, PostgreSQL, Celery, Redis, Docker, and React with TypeScript, running on DigitalOcean. You don't need every piece of it, but you should be comfortable working with this type of system and in a large existing codebase to build the appropriate test strategy and infrastructure.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and making them a deployment gate, including parallelization, quarantining flaky tests, test environments, and seeded data.
• Understanding of what belongs at the unit, integration, and end-to-end testing layers, and the ability to explain these decisions to developers.
• Ability to work closely with developers and infrastructure engineers to improve testing practices and make it easier for developers to write and use tests.
• Sound operational judgment when testing financial workflows, understanding that a missed regression in a tips platform can mean someone doesn't get paid, knowing which high-risk scenarios to test first, and being willing to communicate when software isn't ready to ship.
• Ability to work independently across a distributed team, communicate clearly in writing, and drive work without constant supervision.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Playwright.
• Experience in fintech, payments, or payroll.
• Experience testing third-party API integrations, contract testing, or service virtualization.
• Experience with visual regression testing tools such as Chromatic.
• Experience using AI tools to write and maintain tests effectively.
• Experience being the first test automation engineer in a company.

Required Soft Skills

• Ownership: Ability to take responsibility for the test strategy, automation framework, and quality metrics.
• Autonomy: Ability to work independently across a distributed team and drive work without constant supervision.
• Communication: Ability to communicate clearly and effectively in a remote-first environment. 
• Collaboration: Willingness to work closely with developers and infrastructure engineers and help them adopt effective testing practices.
• Critical thinking: Ability to identify high-risk scenarios and prioritize testing based on potential consequences.
• Pragmatic judgment: Ability to recognize when software is ready to ship and communicate honestly when it is not.

Key Responsibilities

In your first few months:

• Define and document the test strategy, including what to automate at each testing layer, what should block deployments, what developers own, and where manual checks are still needed.
• Develop the existing end-to-end test suite into a stable, reliable framework that runs fast enough for every pull request and blocks deployments when tests fail.
• Prioritize end-to-end test coverage for tip distribution, payouts, and other critical financial workflows.

Over the year:

• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to block merges, working with the infrastructure team on preview environments for pull requests, required CI checks, and the transition from weekly toward daily deployments.
• Build test data factories and seeded datasets that support realistic testing scenarios without using production data.
• Build and maintain a local simulator for third-party payment and banking APIs, keeping it aligned with changes to partner APIs.
• Improve the developer experience by enabling fast local test runs, providing clear failure reports, and reducing flaky tests.
• Define and track quality metrics, including escaped defects, flaky-test rates, and bugs caught before versus after release.

Who this position is not for

• Candidates looking for a manual QA role or a position focused on manual sign-off at the end of a sprint.
• Candidates looking for a management position. This is a hands-on individual contributor role, and there is no team to manage.
• Candidates looking for a product architecture role. The technical direction and money-movement design are owned by two Staff Engineers; this role focuses on test automation and determining whether the software is ready to ship.
• Candidates who expect to join a company with a mature test platform and an established team of automation engineers. The role involves building testing foundations alongside ongoing product development and greenfield work.

We are looking for people who are motivated to learn, take ownership, and grow together with us.

Sound like the right fit? Apply now - let's talk!