Validation engineer Jobs in Chicago, IL

We are a growing technology company in the FinTech and e-commerce space, building secure, enterprise-grade software solutions that power payment and data services. We empower our employees to make a meaningful impact by solving complex challenges, leveraging modern technologies, and continuously improving the way we work. If you're passionate about delivering high-quality software and thrive in a fast-paced environment where your ideas and contributions matter, we'd love to hear from you.

Job Overview:

We are seeking a QA Engineer to lead quality assurance across our software products and help ensure we deliver reliable, high-quality experiences for customers. This person will own test strategy, strengthen testing processes, improve defect visibility, and partner closely with engineering, product, implementation, support, and customers to raise the quality bar across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the overall QA strategy, including manual, regression, exploratory, and automated testing approaches.
• Design and execute test plans for new products, enhancements, and existing functionality to validate quality, usability, and reliability.
• Lead a shift-left quality mindset by participating early in planning, refinement, and requirements discussions so issues are identified before release.
• Identify, document, prioritize, and track defects with enough detail for engineering teams to reproduce, isolate, and resolve issues quickly.
• Retest resolved defects and partner with developers to confirm fixes fully address root causes and edge cases.
• Build robust coverage across happy path, non-happy path, and true edge-case scenarios.
• Drive adoption and expansion of test automation, including integrating automated tests into delivery workflows and CI/CD practices where appropriate.
• Provide recommendations to improve regression coverage, test efficiency, tooling, and overall quality processes.
• Monitor and report on issue trends, testing progress, quality risks, and resolution metrics to support better planning and decision-making.
• Partner cross-functionally with product, engineering, implementation, support, and customers to ensure test plans reflect real-world usage and business impact.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in software quality assurance, including API-driven and non-API software environments.
• Experience leading or coordinating QA efforts, with the judgment to balance hands-on testing work and process improvement.
• Strong FinTech and e-commerce domain knowledge
• Strong test planning, exploratory testing, regression testing, and defect management skills.
• Strong problem-solving ability with excellent attention to detail and the ability to investigate issues from multiple perspectives.
• Ability to move comfortably between detailed issue analysis and higher-level process design.
• Experience with Jira or similar issue-tracking tools.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical issues, quality risks, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fast-paced environment.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with automated testing tools and test automation frameworks.
• Familiarity with version control systems such as Git.
• Experience working in CI/CD environments and using quality metrics to improve release confidence.
• Experience working directly with customers or customer-facing teams to validate real-world workflows.

What Success Looks Like:

• Quality is considered early in the product lifecycle, not only at release time.
• Testing coverage is thorough, repeatable, and continuously improving across new features and existing functionality.
• Defects are identified clearly, prioritized effectively, and resolved faster through strong collaboration with engineering.
• Leadership has better visibility into quality trends, release readiness, and delivery risk through clear reporting and metrics.

Ideal Candidate Profile:

You are naturally curious, structured, and customer-minded. You enjoy finding complex problems before customers do, thinking through edge cases, and building scalable quality practices that improve products over time. You are collaborative, accountable, and motivated by delivering meaningful results.