Senior QA Engineer, Platform

About Altruist

Altruist is transforming the multi-trillion dollar wealth management industry by building an AI platform for wealth professionals. We partner with financial advisors nationwide, empowering them to grow, optimize time and resources, and deliver superior outcomes for their clients.

We're looking for exceptional talent to help us achieve our mission of making financial advice better, more affordable, and accessible to all. If you're passionate about challenging the status quo and want to do the most important work of your life, we'd love to meet you!

But first, our values

Kindness - Kindness doesn’t just equal niceness. We listen to understand. We embrace, and encourage healthy debate and diverse perspectives. We approach conflict openly, honestly, and respectfully.

Brilliance - Humility is the skill we’re most proud of and possessing a growth mindset is always top of mind. We take ownership in everything we touch; regularly using our unique superpowers to reach a common goal as a team. We succeed and fail as one.

Grit - When challenges arise, we stay laser focused on achieving our mission and finding a way forward, even when it’s hard. We are nimble and maintain a sense of urgency, swiftly adapting to change and overcoming obstacles.

The opportunity

Altruist is in the midst of an exceptional growth phase and we're excited to hire a Senior QA Engineer to join our growing Platform team.

The Platform team builds the shared backend services and infrastructure that every product team at Altruist depends on. That makes quality here a different problem: there is rarely a screen to click through, the consumers of what you test are other engineering teams, and a defect that escapes doesn't affect one feature — it affects everything built on top of it.

In this role you'll own quality for distributed backend services, working at the API, contract, event, and data layers. You'll build durable automation that gives product teams confidence to move quickly, and you'll partner with Platform engineers to make services testable by design rather than verified after the fact. This is a hands-on role for someone who is genuinely comfortable in the backend and wants their testing to have leverage across the whole organization.

Your impact

Own end-to-end functional testing for Platform services across API, event, and database layers

Design and validate contracts between services, catching breaking changes before downstream product teams ever see them

Build and maintain test automation frameworks in Java using REST Assured and Postman for API coverage, extending to Playwright or Selenium where Platform capabilities surface in the UI

Write SQL and data validation to verify that API behavior, event streams, and persisted state actually agree

Verify security fixes and cover the authentication/authorization paths

Detect configuration drift across environments

Test asynchronous and event-driven flows, including retries, idempotency, ordering, and failure recovery

Integrate automated test suites into GitLab CI/CD pipelines so failures surface early and reliably

Assess blast radius for Platform changes and define the regression scope that shared services require

Partner with Platform engineers to build testability into services from design onward

Use Jira to manage test cases, track defects, and support efficient agile workflows

Leverage AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor to accelerate test script development, generate test data, and improve defect triage and reporting

Identify quality gaps in processes and systems and champion continuous improvement across the testing function

What you bring

Experience - 5+ years of experience as a QA Engineer or Software Test Engineer, ideally within a B2B financial services, fintech, or SaaS organization

Strong hands-on experience testing backend services and APIs, with a demonstrated ability to uncover meaningful defects through exploratory and contract-level testing

Experience testing microservices and distributed systems, where failures cross service boundaries

Experience building, maintaining, and executing test plans in partnership with cross-functional teams

Experience working in agile environments with a regular release cadence

Hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated regression coverage

Education - B.A. / B.S. in Computer Science or a related field

Technical aptitude - Proficiency with SQL and comfort validating data directly in the database; proficiency with Java or another object-oriented language; hands-on experience building API automation with REST Assured and Postman; able to get up to speed on modern backend stacks (Spring Boot, Postgres, Kubernetes, Kafka, Temporal, Snowflake)

Ownership - Takes accountability for product quality end to end and proactively drives testing strategy, execution, and follow-through

Superb communication - Communicates clearly with engineers, product managers, and cross-functional stakeholders to clarify requirements, surface risks, and drive alignment..

Resilience - Thrives in a fast-paced environment, adapts to changing priorities, and maintains a high bar for quality under pressure

Assurance - Brings sound judgment and confidence to testing decisions, defect triage, and release readiness recommendations

Creative problem solving - Finds practical, scalable solutions to quality challenges and uses both exploratory thinking and automation to improve outcomes

Bonus points if you bring

Practiced Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, pipelines in GitLab a plus

Familiarity with data encryption methodologies focused on PII

Familiarity with tooling such as Kafka, Debezium, Temporal, and OpenTelemetry

Performance or load testing experience against backend services

Experience testing behind feature flags and reasoning about coverage across flag states

Experience testing AI-powered applications, including chatbots, assistants, or other LLM- or ML-based systems

Knowledge of brokerage platforms and financial services industry, including margin, options, account types, and trade lifecycle

San Francisco, CA salary range

$185,000 — $230,000 USD

What we bring

Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is a priority. We are proud of the culture we’ve built and are cognizant of the ever-changing professional landscape. Our dynamic offering of perks and benefits are tailored for you to feel your best while doing your best.

Stunning, amenity-filled office spaces in Culver City, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Dallas, TX. Our offices are intentionally designed for comfort, collaboration, and productivity.

Competitive total compensation.

Premium healthcare, dental, and vision insurance plans (HMO and PPO).

401k savings plan with a 4% match and immediate vesting.

16 week paid parental leave after one year of employment.

Professional growth and development opportunities including an employee mobility program and an annual L&D budget allocation for each employee.

Company perks program (includes discounts on pet insurance, fitness, cell phone plans, and travel, etc.).

Financial guidance program (includes counseling on navigating debt, tracking personal spend, saving and planning goals, home-purchasing preparedness, etc.).

One month work from anywhere policy (with the exception of a few countries).

Total compensation includes a competitive benefits package, along with a bonus program for eligible roles. For salaried positions, a salary offer will be determined by a number of factors including experience, skill level, internal pay equity, geographic location, and other relevant business considerations. We review all employee pay and compensation programs regularly to ensure fair, equitable, and competitive pay. At Altruist, we are committed to providing fair, equitable, and competitive compensation by leveraging market data to inform our