Software Quality Engineer II (Johannesburg, ZA)

Job Purpose

To design, engineer, and continuously improve quality practices for AI-driven conversational banking platforms by embedding automation, AI-aware validation, and observability across the full engineering lifecycle. This role is accountable for ensuring:

• High-quality, reliable customer conversational experiences
• Robust and scalable API and integration-driven systems
• Accurate and consistent AI/NLP interpretation and response behaviour

The SQE operates as a software engineer specialising in quality, contributing to system design, automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and production quality insights to enable continuous delivery with confidence

Job Responsibilities

QE Strategy & Lifecycle Ownership

• Contribute to execution of the QE strategy for conversational banking
• Embed quality across:
• Design
• Development
• CI/CD pipelines
• Production
• Champion:
• Shift-left practices (test design, testability)
• Shift-right practices (observability, production validation)

2. Automation Engineering 

• Design and implement scalable, reusable automation frameworks
• Develop automation across:
• APIs (primary focus)
• Integration layers
• Event-driven systems
• Ensure:
• Test automation is integrated and executed in CI/CD pipelines
• High test reliability and maintainability

3. Conversational, NLP & AI Testing 

Design and implement validation for AI-driven behaviour, including:

• Conversational Validation
  • Multi-turn conversations
  • Context retention
  • End-to-end journey flow

• NLP Validation
  • Intent recognition accuracy
  • Entity extraction accuracy
  • Confidence threshold validation

Job Responsibilities Continue

• LLM / AI Response Validation

• Validate:
  • Response correctness and relevance
  • Consistency of responses
  • Handling of ambiguous inputs
• Test:
  • Prompt behaviour (where applicable)
  • Guardrails and fallback mechanisms
  • Hallucination and incorrect responses
• Dataset Engineering
• Build and maintain:
  • NLP test datasets
  • Conversation variations
  • Edge cases (slang, multilingual inputs, typos)

4. CI/CD & Quality Engineering 

• Own integration of automated tests into:
• CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps / Jenkins)
• Implement:
• Quality gates (coverage, pass rates, reliability)
• Ensure:
• Continuous regression execution
• Fast feedback loops for developers

5. Observability & Production Quality 

• Monitor production conversational quality:
• Conversation success rate
• Escalation rates
• Intent accuracy trends
• Latency
• Analyse telemetry to:
• Identify defects and patterns
• Improve test coverage
• Feed insights into backlog
• Establish:
• Production → Test feedback loops

6. Non-Functional & Resilience Engineering

• Perform:
• Performance testing for APIs and conversational services
• Load and latency validation
• Validate:
• System resilience
• Failover and degradation behaviour

7. Collaboration & Agile Engineering

• Work as part of cross-functional squads
• Contribute to:
• Refinement
• Design sessions
• Sprint delivery
• Influence:
• Testability
• Definition of Done (automation, quality gates)

Essential Qualifications - NQF Level

• Professional Qualifications/Honour’s Degree

Preferred Qualification

BSc IT or BComm IT or similar

Preferred Certifications

ISTQB Agile Foundation. ISTQB Advanced certification (preferred). Bootcamp training in Agile & DevOps.

Minimum Experience Level

• 5+ years in Quality Engineering / Software Engineering in Test
• Strong experience in:
• API automation
• CI/CD pipeline integration
• Practical exposure to:
• Conversational platforms / AI systems

Technical / Professional Knowledge

• Object-orientated Programming (OOP)
• Development languages; C#, Java
• Mobile Test Automation
• Soap and RESTFUL services
• Use of testing tools and frameworks (E.g. Selenium, Appium, RestAssured, Karate, Jira, JMeter)
• Service virtualisation & Data virtualisation
• Performance and load testing
• Vulnerability testing

Behavioural Competencies

• Building Partnerships
• Decision Making
• Influencing
• Driving for Results
• Technical/Professional Knowledge and Skills
• High-Impact Communication
• Innovation

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Please contact the Nedbank Recruiting Team at +27 860 555 566