Senior QA Engineer Manual Testing & Application Monitoring

About the Role

Astek Middle East is seeking a Senior QA Engineer – Manual Testing & Application Monitoring to join their team in Makkah, with work also available in Jeddah. This full-time role focuses on ensuring the functional quality, technical stability, and reliability of digital eCommerce platforms. The position involves hands-on manual testing, API and integration testing, application observability, and production incident investigation, requiring 5-10 years of experience.

Role Responsibilities

The Senior QA Engineer will be responsible for validating complex transactional customer journeys, troubleshooting technical defects, monitoring application health, and collaborating with engineering teams and external vendors to resolve customer-impacting issues. Key responsibilities include:

• Designing, developing, and executing functional, regression, integration, smoke, and end-to-end test cases.
• Validating complex web-based customer journeys, including registration, quotation, checkout, payment, and post-purchase transactions.
• Performing cross-browser compatibility, responsive design, and mobile web testing.
• Operating application monitoring and observability tools to investigate production issues across frontend, backend, API, and infrastructure layers.
• Monitoring application exceptions, failed transactions, API availability, latency, slow page loads, user-impacting errors, and performance regressions.
• Testing REST APIs using Postman or equivalent tools, validating request and response payloads, authentication, status codes, and error handling.
• Acting as a technical quality contact between business stakeholders, internal IT teams, and external development vendors.
• Reproducing production incidents and providing clear, evidence-based defect reports.
• Maintaining QA execution reports, defect registers, incident investigation reports, and application stability reports.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• At least 6+ years of software QA experience, with strong hands-on manual testing of web applications.
• Proven experience testing complex transactional web applications, ideally involving eCommerce, checkout, payments, or similar customer-facing workflows.
• Practical API testing experience using Postman, Swagger, or equivalent tools.
• Strong understanding of HTTP, JSON, REST APIs, status codes, and client-server architecture.
• Proficiency in browser developer tools, particularly Console and Network, for investigating JavaScript errors, failed requests, and API issues.
• Experience with Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent defect and test management tools.
• Ability to investigate technical defects, document reproducible evidence, and collaborate effectively with developers and external vendors.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical findings and business impact clearly.

Highly Preferred Skills

• Hands-on production experience with at least one application observability or APM platform, such as Sentry, Datadog APM/RUM, New Relic, Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Grafana, Cisco AppDynamics, Azure Application Insights, or AWS CloudWatch.
• Demonstrated personal involvement in investigating production incidents affecting application functionality, performance, API availability, or customer transactions.
• Experience interpreting application logs, metrics, traces, exception stack traces, API latency, and release health indicators.
• Experience in eCommerce, fintech, banking, insurance, or other transaction-intensive digital environments.

Additional Advantages

• Direct experience configuring Sentry alerts, dashboards, issue tracking, or instrumentation.
• Basic JavaScript or TypeScript and SQL knowledge.
• Familiarity with Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium.
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines, Agile delivery, GA4, or behavioral analytics tools.
• ISTQB certification.

Important Note

This is a technical QA role that extends beyond executing predefined manual test cases. Candidates must be comfortable troubleshooting technical issues and are strongly preferred to have hands-on production monitoring and incident investigation experience.