QA Engineer (Backend / Data Systems)

QA Engineer (Backend / Data Systems)

Location: Surat, Gujarat, India Employment Type: Full-time, Onsite Experience: 3–5+ Years

About Alphabin

Alphabin is a QA consulting firm where testing is our core focus, not just a final step. We partner with both startups and established companies to ensure software functions as intended before it reaches the customer.

The Role

We are seeking a QA Engineer who excels beyond basic UI testing. This role emphasizes ensuring data integrity throughout its lifecycle – from ingestion, through processing, to final reports or dashboards. You will be responsible for verifying data accuracy at every stage.

This involves tracking data from external sources, through systems like Kafka, into databases such as MongoDB or Postgres, and ensuring its accuracy as it's transformed into business-critical metrics. You will be instrumental in detecting and resolving subtle issues that arise.

Your responsibilities will include querying databases directly to validate data, rather than solely relying on API responses.

Key Responsibilities

• Test the entire data pipeline, from start to finish, not just isolated layers.
• Thoroughly investigate the accuracy of calculations, handling edge cases, and understanding system behavior during device or data source outages and backfill processes.
• Validate new integrations before deployment, ensuring correct field mappings, sign conventions, and robustness against malformed or partial data.
• Ensure pipeline failures are clearly signaled, not silently lost.
• Execute API regression tests (using tools like Postman and automated suites) and maintain these test collections.
• Write SQL queries to independently verify pipeline outputs against raw source data.
• Develop regression suites to proactively identify breaking changes across a multi-language, multi-repo codebase.
• Investigate production issues, tracing them back to the specific service or job responsible, and documenting them clearly for immediate engineer action.
• Build and expand automated test suites (UI and API) using frameworks like Playwright, Selenium, REST Assured, or Appium.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to catch issues pre-release.
• Utilize AI tools daily to accelerate test script writing and maintenance.
• Collaborate closely with developers and product teams to resolve ambiguities early in the development cycle.

What We're Looking For

• 3–5 years of QA experience, with significant time spent testing backend or data systems, not solely UI testing.
• Proficiency in writing SQL queries for data verification.
• Strong API testing skills, including experience with Postman, REST concepts, authentication tokens, and reading Swagger/OpenAPI documentation.
• An understanding of asynchronous systems and the distinction between deployment and data fix confirmation.
• Ability to create detailed bug reports with hypotheses, steps to reproduce, and scope assessment.
• Scripting ability in Python or Node.js for ad-hoc testing.
• Experience in setting up automation frameworks from scratch.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Nice-to-Haves

• Prior experience testing IoT/telemetry data, including device-level data streams (MQTT, dataloggers), handling device offline/reconnect states, timestamp/timezone correctness, or validating data against physical/hardware ground truth.
• Exposure to Kafka-based or event-streaming pipelines.
• Familiarity with time-series databases like ClickHouse.
• Experience testing multi-tenant B2B/B2C data.
• Basic Java or Go reading ability.
• Background in the energy, solar, or utilities domain.
• Familiarity with test management tools such as Jira or TestRail.

What Success Looks Like After 90 Days

• Ability to independently trace reported bugs from dashboards back to the raw data.
• Development of a reusable checklist for onboarding new integrations.
• Integration of AI tools into your testing and debugging workflow.
• Identification of at least one critical calculation bug through direct data querying before customer impact.

Why This Role Is Different

At Alphabin, QA is integral to our development process, not an afterthought. You will gain exposure to diverse, data-intensive systems and technologies, fostering rapid career growth.

Why Alphabin

• Competitive compensation.
• Engaging projects that deliver significant value to our clients.
• A team that values QA as a craft.
• Continuous exposure to new tools, technologies, and challenging problems.
• Opportunities for continuous learning and career advancement.