Principal Engineer,Quality Platform Job Cape Town area,South Africa,Software Development

The Company: is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products— Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform.

As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at Quality at is an engineering problem: the platforms, frameworks and AI agents that let teams test well ay that work is spread across a team, with promising prototypes and no dedicated owner. As our Principal Software Engineer for the QA Platform, you'll be that owner. You’ll build our CLIs, MCPs, and full‑stack web apps used by hundreds of users and thousands of agents.

The ideal candidate would be one of the founders or principal engineers at Playwright, Browserstack, Checksum, Sauce Labs or similar dev tools companies. You'll set the technical direction for the QA platform: the frameworks, shared standards, quality context and AI agents that QA engineers and developers across our product groups rely on. You'll decide which prototypes become platforms and which are retired.

This is a software engineering role, not a testing role: you'll build for QA the way a platform team builds for developers, as a multiplier for teams rather than a release gate. At this level you lead by doing. You're a hands‑on individual contributor with no direct reports, trusted to take on ambiguous problems, make consequential technical decisions, and bring people along through influence rather than authority.

What You’ll Do:

Set the direction. Own the multi‑quarter technical vision, architecture and roadmap for the QA platform. Turn ambiguous, cross‑team quality problems into clear technical direction, including ones nobody has fully defined yet. Decide what to build, buy, adopt or retire, and when a problem deserves something purpose‑built.

Build, hands‑on. Write code and prototype the hardest parts yourself, especially where the problem is new or the risk is high. Own what you ship in production: its reliability, security and cost. Bring AI into how we test where it measurably helps, and show the evidence when it doesn't.

Raise the bar and bring people with you. Define what good looks like for quality engineering at , including for AI‑assisted work, and hold that line across teams. Lead technically without authority: set standards, review designs and code, and mentor engineers across QA Enablement and the QA chapter. Partner with engineering leadership, and with the Engineering Enablement PM, who owns rollout and adoption.

You own technical readiness and the evidence that the platform helps.

Essential requirements:

A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Typically 10+ years of professional software engineering, including designing and delivering complex systems.
A track record of setting technical direction across several teams, whatever your title. You've built platforms, frameworks or developer tools that other engineers adopted and relied on.
Deep, hands‑on backend and infrastructure engineering: you design, build and run…

Principal Engineer, Quality Platform