QA Lead - EDA, Azure&Trading Systems

<p><strong>Join Toptal’s Elite Network of Freelance Talent</strong></p><p>Toptal is an exclusive network of the world’s top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers. As one of the fastest-growing fully remote networks globally, we empower professionals to thrive in their freelance careers while working with leading companies around the world.</p><p><strong>About the Client</strong></p><p>Our client is a globally diversified investment organization focused on long-term, value-driven investment strategies.</p><p><strong>General Information</strong></p><p>The position is open to full-time candidates with excellent communication skills to work on-site in Abu Dhabi (UAE) or remotely within 3h of the Abu Dhabi time zone (within 3h of UTC+4).</p><p><strong>Tasks and Deliverables</strong></p><p>Lead, design, and build end-to-end quality for Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), low-latency platform built on Solace messaging, and Azure (AKS). You will own the test strategy, plan, automation framework, CI/CD pipelines, and compliance testing. The role is hands-on and leadership-oriented: you will set standards, coach engineers, and deliver audit-ready evidence for regulated markets.</p><p><strong>Responsibilities</strong></p><p><strong>Own test automation strategy&governance</strong></p><ul><li>Define a shift-left test strategy across unit, integration, contract, E2E, performance, security, and resiliency.</li><li>Establish quality gates (defects, coverage, flakiness budgets, performance SLOs) and release criteria.</li></ul><p><strong>Build a reusable automation framework</strong></p><ul><li>Architect a test framework packaged for reuse across CEE teams.</li><li>Provide libraries/utilities for API, Solace messaging, database, and contract testing.</li><li>Standardize test data management, deterministic fixtures, and parallel/ephemeral execution patterns.</li></ul><p><strong>Event-driven architecture (EDA) testing</strong></p><ul><li>Validate producer/consumer contracts, schema evolution, and topic compatibility.</li><li>Assert ordering, idempotency, exactly/at-least/at-most-once semantics, replay, DLQ handling, and deduplicate keys.</li><li>Prove back-pressure, throttling, and consumer lag behavior under bursty market loads; chaos test broker clusters.</li><li>Enforce schema/contract gates in CI/CD; prevent breaking changes before promote.</li><li>Automate data quality checks for market/reference data, order/trade states, and downstream stores (SQL Server/Azure SQL).</li><li>Implement reconciliation across OMS/EMS, risk, and settlement; verify lineage and PII/PCI masking where relevant.</li><li>Use SQL and profiling to validate accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and SCD/versioned data behaviors.</li><li>Manage golden datasets and synthetic market data at scale for repeatable regression.</li></ul><p><strong>Pipelines, environments&observability</strong></p><ul><li>Orchestrate tests on AKS with Docker/Kubernetes, ephemeral environments.</li><li>Validate OpenTelemetry to correlate trace IDs across services; validate Application Insights/Dynatrace signals in assertions.</li></ul><p><strong>Performance&security</strong></p><ul><li>Baseline latency/throughput; run JMeter/LoadRunner for spike/soak/failover; collaborate on capacity tuning.</li><li>Automate OWASP checks (ZAP), enforce SAST/DAST and dependency scanning (Snyk) with remediation gating.</li></ul><p><strong>Leadership&operations</strong></p><ul><li>Lead QA activities in the project, mentor developers on testability and quality by design.</li><li>Contribute to incident response, RCA, production canary/verification suites, and reliability playbooks.</li><li>Languages/Frameworks: C#, Python, xUnit, PyTest, Pact, Docker,</li><li>APIs/Messaging: REST/GraphQL/SOAP, Solace (preferred), RabbitMQ or Kafka (plus)</li><li>Data: SQL Server, Azure SQL; strong SQL for validation/migrations; data profiling tools</li><li>(Nice) FIX conformance via QuickFIX/N simulators; schema registry tooling</li></ul><p><strong>Required Experience</strong></p><ul><li>8+ years in QA/engineering with 5+ in financial/trading systems (order lifecycle, market data, risk controls)</li><li>Proven delivery of pipeline-integrated .NET automation frameworks and regulated-market audits</li><li>Deep understanding of EDA QA (contracts, ordering, idempotency, replay, DLQs, back-pressure) and data-quality/reconciliation</li><li>Hands-on with Azure/AKS, Azure DevOps, and performance/security automation at scale</li><li>Clear communicator; able to lead cross-functional quality initiatives and coach engineers</li></ul><p><strong>Bonus Experience</strong></p><ul><li>Finance certs (CFA/FRM), Agile/Scrum experience</li><li><strong>Work model:</strong><strong>Onsite in Abu Dhabi</strong><strong>or remote</strong><strong>within 3h of the Abu Dhabi time zone</strong></li><li><strong>Type:</strong>40h/week Contract</li><li><strong>Duration:</strong>6-12 months initia