Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

Position Summary

The Senior SDET is a senior engineer whose dominant contribution is the design, construction, and stewardship of DIME's quality infrastructure. Senior SDETs own the automation frameworks that every engineer at DIME depends on. They design the harnesses, generators, and simulators that make it possible to exercise payment flows safely and reproducibly. They define the test pyramid DIME actually lives by, not just the one written in slides. They are expected to operate as peers of Senior Software Engineers in both technical depth and commercial judgement, and as partners of the Quality Assurance Lead in shaping the quality function itself.

Reporting Line

• Primary reporting line: Quality Assurance Lead.
• Dotted-line / technical reporting: Application Manager / Senior Engineer, with visibility to the CTO on cross-cutting platform decisions.
• Works closely with: Senior Software Engineers, Senior QA Engineers, Payment Services Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Database Engineer, Cybersecurity Specialist, Product Managers.
• Mentors: Junior and mid-level SDETs, QA Engineers learning automation, Software Engineers learning test craft, rotating interns.

Key Responsibilities

• Automation framework architecture: Own the architecture of DIME's automation frameworks end to end - for web, mobile, API, payment protocols, and POS terminals. Make deliberate, documented decisions about tooling, patterns, extension points, and deprecations.
• Test pyramid and coverage strategy: Define, articulate, and defend DIME's test pyramid - the mix of unit, contract, integration, end-to-end, performance, and exploratory tests - and lead the team in keeping actual practice aligned with stated strategy.
• Payment testing infrastructure: Build and operate the specialised tooling required to test payments safely: card and wallet simulators, sandbox integrations with acquirers and issuers, network harnesses, fraud-scenario generators, reconciliation test rigs, and replay tooling for production-like traffic.
• CI/CD and developer experience: Partner with the DevOps Engineer to make DIME's pipelines fast, reliable, and pleasant to use. Drive time-to-signal down, drive flake down, and drive meaningful coverage up. Treat developer experience as a first-class product.
• Performance, load, and chaos engineering: Design and run performance, load, soak, and chaos experiments on payment services. Interpret results rigorously. Work with engineering to remediate, and prevent regressions through continuous performance testing in CI.
• Security and compliance engineering support: Partner with the Cybersecurity Specialist on automated security testing - dependency scanning, static analysis, dynamic analysis, secrets scanning - and on building verifiable evidence for PCI DSS, ISO 27001 / SOC 2, and the Jamaican Data Protection Act, 2020.
• Production-code contribution: Contribute meaningful production code, especially in platform layers - observability, feature flags, configuration, background jobs, API gateways - where the line between building the product and building the ability to test it is thinnest.
• Release engineering leadership: Co-own, with the QA Lead and the Application Manager, release processes for assigned product areas, including automated release health checks, canary analysis, and rollback playbooks.
• Mentorship and team building: Mentor junior and mid-level SDETs, QA Engineers, and Software Engineers on test craft, automation engineering, and systems thinking. Lead internal brown-bags and author technical writing.
• Hiring and calibration: Participate in interviewing for SDET, QA, and Software Engineer roles; contribute to rubrics, take-home exercises, and calibration discussions with the QA Lead, Application Manager, and Talent Acquisition Specialist.
• Cross-functional communication: Translate quality signals into language Product, Sales, Customer Success, Finance, and the executive team can act on. Present release risk, coverage posture, and infrastructure investments credibly.
• Startup ownership: Step outside the role when the company needs it - audit support, investor due-diligence evidence, customer escalation analysis - while protecting the deep work that only a Senior SDET can do.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related discipline, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
• Five or more years of combined software engineering and test engineering experience, with at least two years in an SDET, Test Architect, or equivalent hybrid role.
• Deep proficiency in at least one modern programming language and strong working knowledge of at least one other.
• Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining test automation frameworks that have been adopted and extended by other engineers.
• Proven experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines at scale, and driving flake and runtime improvements.
• Experience with at least two of: performance testing, chaos engineering, contract testing, service virtualisation, or fuzz testing.
• Strong working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containerisation, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Strong written and spoken English, including the ability to write architecture proposals, release risk assessments, and external-facing audit evidence.
• Eligibility to work in Jamaica.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience in fintech, payments, banking, or another regulated domain, with exposure to PCI DSS, PSD2, ISO 20022, AML/CFT, or equivalent frameworks.
• Experience building payment-specific testing infrastructure - card simulators, HSM integration, acquirer / issuer sandboxes, settlement test rigs.
• Experience operating within an ISO 27001, SOC 2, or PCI DSS audit environment.
• Certifications such as ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Automation Engineer, Test Manager), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, or Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP).
• Open-source contributions to testing tools, conference speaking, or published technical writing on test engineering.

Core Competencies

• Strategic quality thinking coupled with senior-engineer craft in code.
• Ability to design frameworks that last, not scripts that break.
• Clarity of communication with both engineers and non-engineers.
• Mentor and multiplier - measurably raises the quality of the engineers around them.
• Commercial awareness - treats quality infrastructure as an investment with measurable return.
• Composure under release pressure and during production incidents.