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