Quality Engineering Lead

Tereina • San Francisco, CA

4d

About The Position

Tereina is an early-stage, well-funded startup supported by SAP, building B2B payment solutions for cross-border payment processing, counterparty management, bank account administration, and compliance workflows. The Quality Engineering Lead owns quality across the company’s software delivery and reports directly to the Senior Director of Engineering. Working as a peer to the engineering managers and UX Engineering Manager, this person will define the test strategy, evolve quality tooling, protect deploys and releases from regressions, and provide visibility into quality from development through production.

This is a strategic role with a hands-on core. The lead sets the direction for quality, writes tests, improves tooling, investigates failures, and works with distributed engineering teams that share responsibility for quality. The role also coordinates testing and certification with banking and partner organizations when required, helping make the company’s compliance and regulatory posture transparent to customers, partners, auditors, and regulators.

Requirements

• 7+ years in software quality, quality engineering, or test engineering, including at least 3 years leading quality strategy and initiatives across multiple engineering teams.
• Solid understanding of commercial payments, including payment lifecycles, returns and exceptions, reconciliation, and end-to-end testing.
• Proven experience defining test strategy and release criteria for a frequently deployed product and reducing regressions.
• Hands-on experience automating API and end-to-end tests and improving test tooling.
• Clear communication skills and experience coordinating projects with external partners or customers, managing timelines and dependencies, aligning stakeholders, and explaining quality status and risk.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI coding assistants and agents to generate, maintain, and analyze tests, and ability to help engineering teams adopt them.
• Experience mentoring engineers across levels and leading through influence, cultivating a supportive, growth-oriented culture in a distributed team across time zones.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with cross-border payments, bank connectivity, or embedded finance.
• Familiarity with bank and payment partner certification processes.
• Experience in regulated financial environments, including test evidence for auditability and compliance requirements such as SOC 2.
• Exposure to SAP-integrated environments.
• Experience integrating automated quality checks into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience establishing a quality engineering practice in an early-stage or scaling company.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the test strategy, including what is tested, at which stage, and what constitutes release readiness for payment flows.
• Apply risk-based testing, focusing deeper validation on high-stakes areas such as money movement and data integrity while enabling automated checks for lower-risk changes.
• Build and continuously improve automated test suites, banking and payment partner simulators, test data management, and test reporting tools.
• Establish deploy checks and release criteria that catch regressions before they reach customers, and provide go/no-go recommendations to engineering managers.
• Verify payment flows under load and confirm they recover gracefully from slow banks, partner outages, and volume spikes.
• Collaborate with engineering leadership on planning, development, and release processes, and represent quality in planning and design reviews.
• Monitor quality outcomes across environments using meaningful measures, share results openly, and work with engineering managers to turn incidents and root-cause findings into improved test coverage.
• Coordinate testing and certification with banking and partner organizations, including test cycles, progress tracking, timelines, and communications through go-live.
• Organize quality evidence so customers, partners, auditors, and regulators can understand how software is validated.
• Act as the functional owner of quality across engineering, lead by example, coach engineers, and build a culture of shared quality ownership.

Benefits

• Opportunity to own the platform and operations function end-to-end and expand scope across products, rails, partners, and markets as the company scales.
• Opportunity to shape payments operations at a fast-moving B2B payments company.
• Work at the intersection of payments operations and AI-enabled automation.
• Collaborative team culture valuing curiosity, inclusion, and sustainable work.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed