Quality Assurance Engineer

Overview

Join Toptal’s Elite Network of Freelance Talent

Toptal is an exclusive network of the world’s top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers. As one of the fastest-growing fully remote networks globally, we empower professionals to thrive in their freelance careers while working with leading companies around the world.

Our client is a globally diversified investment organization focused on long-term, value-driven investment strategies.

The position is open to full-time candidates with excellent communication skills to work on-site in Abu Dhabi (UAE) or remotely within 3h of the Abu Dhabi time zone (within 3h of UTC+4).

Lead, design, and build end-to-end quality for Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), low-latency platform built on Solace messaging, and Azure (AKS). You will own the test strategy, plan, automation framework, CI/CD pipelines, and compliance testing. The role is hands-on and leadership-oriented: you will set standards, coach engineers, and deliver audit-ready evidence for regulated markets.

Own test automation strategy & governance

• Define a shift-left test strategy across unit, integration, contract, E2E, performance, security, and resiliency.
• Establish quality gates (defects, coverage, flakiness budgets, performance SLOs) and release criteria.

Build a reusable automation framework

• Architect a test framework packaged for reuse across CEE teams.
• Provide libraries/utilities for API, Solace messaging, database, and contract testing.
• Standardize test data management, deterministic fixtures, and parallel/ephemeral execution patterns.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) testing

• Validate producer/consumer contracts, schema evolution, and topic compatibility.
• Assert ordering, idempotency, exactly/at-least/at-most-once semantics, replay, DLQ handling, and deduplicate keys.
• Prove back-pressure, throttling, and consumer lag behavior under bursty market loads; chaos test broker clusters.
• Enforce schema/contract gates in CI/CD; prevent breaking changes before promote.
• Automate data quality checks for market/reference data, order/trade states, and downstream stores (SQL Server/Azure SQL).
• Implement reconciliation across OMS/EMS, risk, and settlement; verify lineage and PII/PCI masking where relevant.
• Use SQL and profiling to validate accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and SCD/versioned data behaviors.
• Manage golden datasets and synthetic market data at scale for repeatable regression.

Pipelines, environments & observability

• Orchestrate tests on AKS with Docker/Kubernetes, ephemeral environments.
• Validate Open Telemetry to correlate trace IDs across services; validate Application Insights/Dynatrace signals in assertions.

Performance & security

• Baseline latency/throughput; run JMeter/Load Runner for spike/soak/failover; collaborate on capacity tuning.
• Automate OWASP checks (ZAP), enforce SAST/DAST and dependency scanning (Snyk) with remediation gating.

Leadership & operations

• Lead QA activities in the project, mentor developers on testability and quality by design.
• Contribute to incident response, RCA, production canary/verification suites, and reliability playbooks.
• Languages/Frameworks: C#, Python, xUnit, PyTest, Pact, Docker,
• APIs/Messaging: REST/Graph
  
  QL/SOAP, Solace (preferred), Rabbit
  
  MQ or Kafka (plus)
• Data: SQL Server, Azure SQL; strong SQL for validation/migrations; data profiling tools
• (Nice) FIX conformance via Quick
  
  FIX/N simulators; schema registry tooling

• 8+ years in QA/engineering with 5+ in financial/trading systems (order lifecycle, market data, risk controls)
• Proven delivery of pipeline-integrated .NET automation frameworks and regulated-market audits
• Deep understanding of EDA QA (contracts, ordering, idempotency, replay, DLQs, back-pressure) and data-quality/reconciliation
• Hands-on with Azure/AKS, Azure Dev Ops, and performance/security automation at scale
• Clear communicator; able to lead cross-functional quality initiatives and coach engineers

• Finance certs (CFA/FRM), Agile/Scrum experience
• Work model: Onsite in Abu Dhabi or remote within 3h of the Abu Dhabi time zone
• Type: 40h/week Contract
• Duration: 6-12 months initially, with long-term engagement potential
• Authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work in their country of residence without employer sponsorship