QA Chapter Lead

About Watu Credit

Watu Credit is a fintech company operating across Africa and Latin America focused on providing device financing and financial services to customers traditionally excluded from formal financial systems. They finance motorcycles, smartphones, and other income-generating assets using a tech-driven, data-centered approach, enabling customers to build credit histories and own productive assets. Their platform supports millions of users in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and continues expanding into Latin America.

Role Summary

The QA Chapter Lead is a senior quality assurance engineer who simultaneously functions as an embedded QA engineer within a squad and as a technical lead across multiple QA squads. Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering for Digital Experience, this role involves setting and maintaining QA standards, automation frameworks, and testing strategies throughout the engineering function encompassing 4 squads (4-6 embedded QA engineers total).

Unlike a traditional QA manager role, the position does not manage personnel line reporting but serves as a technical leader and standard-bearer, fostering cross-squad consistency via monthly QA Guild meetings with counterpart leads.

Key Responsibilities

• Participate in all squad ceremonies including sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to ensure quality activities are integrated from sprint inception.
• Collaborate with Product Owners to define precise acceptance criteria ensuring stories meet quality standards before sprint inclusion.
• Create and maintain automated test suites appropriate to the squad’s domain, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and own test coverage responsibilities.
• Enforce the squad's Definition of Done quality gates so that no code is released without passing established conditions.
• Define and uphold QA standards for the entire function, covering test structure, tooling, naming conventions, coverage thresholds, and continuous integration gate configurations.
• Manage onboarding processes for new QA engineers, ensuring adherence to chapter standards and baseline expectations.
• Lead the monthly cross-chapter QA Guild meetings to align tools, frameworks, and Definition of Done standards, collaborating closely with counterpart leads.
• Evaluate, select, and maintain automation frameworks and tooling, ensuring documentation is comprehensive and accessible to all QA engineers.
• Report regularly to the Head of Engineering on QA chapter health metrics including test coverage trends, flaky test rates, automation backlogs, and systemic quality concerns.

Candidate Profile

Essential Qualifications:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in software QA with at least 2 years in a QA leadership role driving test strategies spanning multiple teams.
• Strong expertise in automation engineering, implementing production-level test code that is maintainable, readable, and reliable within CI pipelines.
• In-depth experience with API testing including REST, contract testing, and integration tests, focusing on backend QA surfaces.
• Proficiency in Java backend environments with ability to read code, comprehend architecture, and write corresponding tests.
• Proven ability to define and maintain QA standards in Agile squads as an active contributor rather than a final-stage gatekeeper.

Preferred Skills:

• Background in fintech, payments, or digital financial services with understanding of systems handling financial transactions.
• Experience in performance and load testing related to payment throughput and API concurrency limits.
• Mandatory mobile app QA experience for candidates for specific QA Chapter roles focused on Android applications.
• History of developing or evolving QA chapters, guilds, or communities of practice across multiple teams.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted test generation tools such as test case creation, regression triage, and synthetic data generation using advanced language models.

Additional Information

The QA Chapter Lead reports directly to the Head of Engineering Digital Experience and works embedded within one squad, with a chapter scope spanning four squads. There is no direct managerial responsibility over QA engineers; instead, the focus is on technical leadership and standards-setting.

Watu is committed to building an inclusive and diverse team reflective of its markets. Applications undergo a structured recruitment process including conversations with the Head of Engineering, technical interviews, and leadership discussions. Personal data collected will be handled according to relevant data protection regulations strictly for hiring purposes.