QA Engineer

QA Engineer

Full time US working hours (3pm-11pm/4pm-12am SAST)

Remote (within South Africa)

Independent Contractor

The Role

We're looking for a hands-on QA Engineer to own quality across our product. This person will sit closely with the engineering team, speak their language, and ensure everything we ship is solid, well-tested, and production-ready. This is our first dedicated QA hire, with real ownership and room to grow into building out a QA function and team as we scale.

Responsibilities

Ensure features are built to match product requirements and acceptance criteria

Verify features are working correctly and free of bugs before release

Own production smoke testing after every deploy and flag regressions quickly

Identify, document, and track defects through to resolution

Build and maintain test plans, test cases, and QA documentation

Partner with developers and product to catch issues early in the cycle, not after release

Eventually introduce and own automated testing as the platform and team grow

What We're Looking For

Technically minded — understands software beyond the UI and can reason about how systems work

Ability to dig into technical issues, not just surface-level UI bugs

Strong communicator who can bridge product and engineering

Detail-oriented and proactive — actively seeks out issues rather than waiting for them to surface

Confident pushing back when something isn't right

Good team player

Major Pluses (Any One of These Moves a Candidate to the Top)

Deep payroll, HR, or benefits domain experience — candidates with a background in payroll operations, HR tech, benefits administration, or 401(k), combined with technical aptitude, are strongly encouraged to apply. Understanding how the system should behave is often more valuable than knowing how to test it

Software development background — hands-on experience writing or reading code in any language. Understanding how code works, not just how to break it

QA experience — manual testing, test case design, defect tracking, or experience as the first/solo QA at a company

Test automation experience — Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, or similar. We'll get there, and we'd value someone who can lead that effort

API testing (Postman or similar)

SQL comfort for verifying data behind the UI

Prior experience in a fast-moving tech environment

Originally posted on Himalayas