Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

HEYLIM is building autonomous specialty-coffee stations — wall-mounted, battery-powered pillars that serve auction-lot coffee in 30 seconds, with no barista and no line.

What's behind the invisible experience is a vertically integrated stack:

• iOS and Android apps with real business logic, built in Flutter with native parts (Live Activities, etc.); web on React
• A Kubernetes-backed Golang backend with in-app payments and a lot of interesting failure modes
• IoT telemetry and dispatching over MQTT, tying the apps to real machines in the field
• Custom chassis/machinery and firmware on our own STM32-based microcontrollers
• An AI-first engineering culture with a serious quality harness underneath
• Maintenance, logistics, and franchisee management web apps

We launch in Dubai in May 2026, with US preparations starting right now. We need a QA engineer who can help us ship with confidence.

Why this role

Your day-to-day is APIs, web and mobile flows, end-to-end tests, and the CI pipeline that runs them, plus the human work of partnering with engineers on what to test, what to skip, and where the risk lives. You'll be taking over from a strong QA engineer who's moving on to MAANG.

The engineers are senior and fast, the shipping cadence is tight, and the goal is to make them faster by building trustworthy guardrails. The team treats QA as a partner, not a gate or the checkbox before prod. If you've spent the last few years wishing engineers would talk to you earlier, this is that job.

We take AI-assisted development seriously, which means we also take the scaffolding around it and related failure modes seriously. Our quality harness is a real part of how we build.

What you'll do

• Own end-to-end test automation across APIs, the backend, and client apps: Python + pytest for the service side, Playwright for web/end-to-end, Allure for reporting, and a tool for mobile flows (currently Appium)
• Design the test strategy for complex flows that cross boundaries: app, API/DB, payments, MQTT, machine, firmware, back to the user. These are the interesting bugs
• Partner with engineers during feature development, not after: review designs, flag risks early, suggest what's worth testing
• Debug hard, cross-service issues alongside engineers. Read logs, reason about distributed failures, narrow things down
• Harden payments flows — retries, refunds, failed charges, partial outages, Apple Pay / Google Pay, receipts
• Validate releases across iOS, Android, web, and backend, including staged rollouts and field-facing behavior

Who we're looking for

• 3+ years of experience in QA automation / SDET / test engineering, with a portfolio of tests you'd actually be proud to show someone
• Strong Python, comfortable writing and maintaining a pytest codebase: scoping, fixture factories, flake resistance, the works
• Playwright experience for end-to-end and API testing (JS/TS works, too); you know how to keep a suite fast and reproducible
• Solid grasp of API testing: auth flows, idempotency, versions and environments, caching, the stuff that breaks in production
• Genuinely good at troubleshooting: you read logs carefully, form hypotheses, and narrow things down rather than guessing
• You see your job as making the engineering team ship great product, not policing it
• Clear written communication. Bug reports that don't require a meeting

Nice to have

• Mobile app testing experience, especially Flutter-based apps or payments-heavy mobile flows
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, and Redis
• Exposure to MQTT or other IoT/pub-sub messaging and OTA updates is useful for the device-side of our world
• Experience using AI tooling thoughtfully in a QA workflow and knowing when it's wrong
• Curiosity about vertically integrated hardware/software solutions. If you think it's cool, you'll have more fun here
• A coffee habit that has gotten out of hand

Location & logistics

We're currently remote: the team is distributed and the Cary office isn't open yet. Once it is (targeting June 2026), this becomes a hybrid role, so you'll need to be based in or near the Raleigh / Cary area.

Base salary: $110k–$145k.

US work authorization required as we are not able to sponsor.