Senior Automation Engineer

Ozow is a leading fintech company that's redefining digital payments in South Africa and beyond. We're dedicated to making payments more accessible, secure, and convenient for both businesses and consumers. As a fast-growing player in the financial technology sector, Ozow fosters a culture of innovation, diversity, and inclusivity. We believe in pushing the boundaries of what's possible and are committed to making a positive impact on the world through our payment solutions.

The Senior Automation Engineer leads the design, development and implementation of scalable quality-engineering and automation solutions across Ozow's payments ecosystem — owning automation architecture and standards, strengthening release confidence, and advancing AI-assisted, observable and production-ready testing practices across teams. This is a full-stack quality role covering both back-end and front-end. Alongside owning automation, the engineer performs hands-on manual and exploratory testing and the test analysis that informs what gets covered and how, operating as a senior quality owner across the product rather than an automation specialist alone.

Perform peer reviews and mentor the Intermediate Automation Engineer, QA practitioners and developers on automation standards.

Provide technical direction to the Intermediate Automation Engineer and influence automation decisions across teams.

Contribute to technical assessments, documentation and quality-engineering governance.

Lead the analysis, design, development and maintenance of reusable automation frameworks across Ozow products and payment platforms.

Define framework architecture, coding standards, patterns, governance and review practices.

Develop and optimise UI and API automation using Playwright, Rest Sharp and tools aligned with Ozow's technology stack.

Build utilities that improve test-data management, execution, diagnostics and engineering efficiency.

Translate business and technical risk into an end-to-end automation strategy and prioritised roadmap.

Identify high-value automation opportunities across UI, API, integration, contract and service layers.

Design automation for critical payment journeys, including authentication, idempotency, reconciliation and settlement scenarios.

Perform hands-on manual and exploratory testing across front-end and back-end, with a focus on new features, high-risk changes and areas not yet suited to automation.

Carry out requirements and test analysis, turning specifications and payment workflows into clear test conditions, cases and coverage, ahead of and independent of automation.

Apply human judgement to usability, edge-case and end-to-end behaviour that automated checks are not designed to catch.

Own the balance between manual and automated coverage, deciding what is validated manually and what graduates into the automated regression suite.

Lead responsible adoption of AI-generated test design, LLM-assisted exploratory testing and regression risk analysis.

Evaluate self-healing locator approaches and intelligent flaky-test detection and triage.

Define controls that protect accuracy, security, maintainability and human oversight when using AI-assisted testing.

Integrate automated suites and quality gates into Team City and Bitbucket-based delivery pipelines.

Optimise test selection, parallel execution and feedback times to support frequent releases.

Partner with Dev Ops on reliable environments, containerised execution and production-like test data.

Implement meaningful automation logging, metrics, dashboards and failure-analysis capabilities using Allure, Datadog or comparable tools.

Analyse unstable tests and continuously improve framework reliability, execution performance and reporting quality.

Use production signals to refine automated coverage and prevent repeat incidents.

Establish contract-testing practices between distributed services and payment integrations.

Lead performance and reliability-testing initiatives using k6 or comparable tooling.

Ensure non-functional risks are included in release-quality decisions.

Relevant tech qualification is preferred, with any additional certification a bonus.

At least five years of automation and quality-engineering experience in a…