Senior Principal QA Engineer

About the role

As a Senior Principal QA Engineer you will own product quality across web, mobile, API, and integration platforms for a fast‑growing Saudi SaaS startup that secures digital agreements and identity verification.

Key responsibilities

• Develop, implement and manage the QA strategy for features and releases across web, mobile and API platforms.
• Create and maintain automated end‑to‑end test suites (UI and API) using modern frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress and Selenium.
• Automate API testing, including contract, integration and fuzzing tests for REST/GraphQL endpoints.
• Conduct performance, load and scalability testing with tools like JMeter, k6 or Gatling and help optimise capacity.
• Lead security‑focused testing for authentication flows, role/permission validation and data‑masking scenarios.
• Produce comprehensive test plans, acceptance criteria and QA tickets; triage defects and validate fixes across environments.
• Integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins) to provide fast feedback on pull requests.
• Collaborate with SRE and DevOps to collect telemetry, logs and metrics for observability and post‑release validation.
• Analyse production incidents, contribute to post‑mortems and suggest corrective actions.
• Mentor and coach other QA engineers, promoting exploratory and shift‑left testing practices.
• Define release‑gating criteria and support leadership in go/no‑go decisions.

Required profile

• Minimum 8 years of QA experience in product or SaaS environments with ownership of automation and release quality.
• Strong expertise in front‑end UI and API automation (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, REST‑assured, Postman/Newman).
• Experience with performance/load testing tools (k6, JMeter, Gatling or equivalents).
• Familiarity with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins) and integrating tests into pipelines.
• Proficient in scripting or programming languages such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or Java.
• Knowledge of web and mobile testing approaches, including responsive design, cross‑browser testing and device emulators.
• Experience with authentication/authorization flows, encryption and third‑party identity integrations.
• Skilled in writing clear test plans, producing reproducible bug reports and communicating trade‑offs.
• Comfortable working in Agile environments using tools like Jira and Confluence.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence engineers, product managers and leadership.

Required skills

• Playwright
• Cypress
• Selenium
• REST‑assured
• Postman
• Newman
• k6
• JMeter
• Gatling
• GitHub Actions
• GitLab CI
• Jenkins
• Python
• JavaScript
• TypeScript
• Java