QA Engineer (HR & Payroll)
Summary
First dedicated QA hire owning quality for an HR/payroll product: verifying features against acceptance criteria, running production smoke tests after deploys, tracking defects, and eventually introducing test automation. Remote within South Africa on US working hours; payroll/HR domain knowledge and tools like Postman, SQL, and Cypress/Playwright are strong pluses.
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