Quality Engineering Lead

About Tereina

Tereina is on a mission to revolutionize B2B payments. We're a well-funded, early-stage startup supported by one of the largest software companies in the world, SAP. We’re building cutting-edge solutions that will transform the way businesses move money. Our platform handles cross-border payment processing, counterparty management, bank account administration, and compliance workflows for enterprise customers worldwide.

Quality engineering at Tereina is about earning confidence in every change we ship — from test strategy and quality tooling through release readiness and the quality evidence our partners and regulators rely on. Our goal is a zero-touch payment process, where payments flow straight through from initiation to the beneficiary without manual intervention. That only works if the software behind it holds up release after release, across every environment.

About the Role

Reporting directly to the Senior Director of Engineering, the Quality Engineering Lead owns quality across Tereina's software delivery. You will work as a peer to the Engineering Manager – Payment Team, the Engineering Manager – Platform, and the UX Engineering Manager. You will define our test strategy, build and evolve the quality tooling our engineers rely on, and make sure our deploy and release cycle stays free of regressions. You will partner with engineering leadership to shape how we deliver software and give the whole company a clear view of quality across every environment, from development through production.

This is a strategic role with a hands-on core. You will set the direction for quality across Tereina and lead by example — writing tests, improving tooling, and digging into failures yourself. As the functional owner of quality, you will work with our engineering teams, distributed across time zones, who share that ownership and help you reach it. When a partner certification or go-live calls for it, you will also step into project coordination with our banking and partner organizations, so that our compliance and regulatory posture is transparent to everyone who depends on it.

Key Responsibilities

• Test Strategy: Define and own Tereina's test strategy for delivering software — what we test, at which stage, and what "ready to release" means for our payment flows. Take a risk-based approach: focus deep testing on high-stakes areas such as money movement and data integrity, and let automated checks clear low-risk changes quickly.

• Quality Tooling: Build and continuously improve the tooling that lets engineers test early and often: automated test suites, simulators for our banking and payment partners, test data management, and reporting that shows what passed, what failed, and why.

• Regression-Free Releases: Make sure every deploy and release protects what already works. Establish the checks and release criteria that catch regressions before they reach customers, and give clear go/no-go recommendations to the engineering managers who own each service.

• Performance & Resilience: Verify that our payment flows hold up under load and recover gracefully when things go wrong — a slow bank, a partner outage, or a spike in volume — so payments keep flowing without manual intervention.

• Delivery Process: Collaborate with engineering leadership on adjustments to how we plan, build, and release software, and represent quality in planning and design reviews, so that quality is built in from the start rather than inspected at the end.

• Quality Visibility: Monitor quality outcomes across all environments with a small set of meaningful measures — such as the share of payments that need manual intervention, defects that escape to production, failed changes, and release readiness — and share them openly. Partner with the engineering managers, who own production health and incident response, so that every incident and root-cause finding turns into better test coverage.

• Partner Coordination: Coordinate testing and certification activities with our banking and partner organizations. Work alongside the Payment Team, which owns the integrations themselves, to plan test cycles, track progress, and keep everyone informed from kickoff through go-live.

• Compliance & Regulatory Transparency: Ensure our quality evidence is organized and easy to share, so that customers, partners, auditors, and regulators can clearly see how we validate the software that moves their money.

• Quality Ownership: Act as the functional owner of quality across engineering. Lead by example, coach engineers on good testing habits, and rally teams around shared quality goals, building a culture where everyone owns quality.

Qualifications

• Experience: 7+ years in software quality, quality engineering, or test engineering, including at least 3 years leading quality strategy and initiatives across multiple engineering teams.

• Payments Expertise: Solid understanding of how commercial payments work — payment lifecycles, returns and exceptions, and reconciliation — and how to test them end to end.

• Test Strategy Experience: Proven track record of defining a test strategy and release criteria for a product with frequent deployments, and of reducing regressions as a result.

• Hands-on Engineering: Experience automating API and end-to-end tests and improving test tooling yourself — you lead by doing.

• Collaboration & Coordination: Clear communicator with experience coordinating projects with external partners or customers — managing timelines and dependencies, keeping stakeholders aligned, and explaining quality status and risk across levels and functions.

• AI-Assisted Engineering: Hands-on experience with modern AI coding assistants and agents — using them to generate, maintain, and analyze tests — and the ability to help engineering teams adopt them effectively.

• Inclusive Leadership: Experience mentoring engineers across levels and leading through influence rather than authority, cultivating a supportive, growth-oriented culture in a distributed team across time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with cross-border payments, bank connectivity, or embedded finance.

• Familiarity with bank and payment partner certification processes.

• Experience in regulated financial environments, including how test evidence supports 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.

Why Join?

• Growth: Own the platform and the operations function end-to-end, and expand your scope across new products, rails, partners, and markets as we scale.

• Impact: Shape how payments operations scale at a fast-moving B2B payments company.

• Innovation: Work at the intersection of payments operations and AI-enabled automation.

• Culture: Join a collaborative team that values curiosity, inclusion, and sustainable work.

We are looking for curious, driven builders who want to create secure, scalable, user-friendly payments products. If you do not meet every qualification but bring initiative and a growth mindset, we encourage you to apply.

We embrace AI as a powerful tool for innovation and welcome team members eager to leverage it in their work. As an equal opportunity employer, we're committed to diversity, inclusion, and creating an environment where everyone can thrive.