Founding QA Engineer (AI-Native)
Build the quality infrastructure behind the next generation of global agentic commerce.
Role Overview
Manif AI is looking for a Founding QA Lead to build a modern, AI-native quality engineering organization from the ground up. This is not a traditional manual QA role. The focus is on building a continuous, automated validation platform that enables engineering teams to ship quickly without compromising reliability.
You will work closely with the founding engineering team to define how quality is engineered across the company, embedding AI throughout the software development lifecycle—from specifications and implementation to testing, validation, and production monitoring.
Opportunity Snapshot
Experience
6+ years of professional experience.
Work Arrangement
Remote opportunity.
Employment Type
Full-time, permanent position.
Working Shift
Asia/Kolkata time zone (GMT+05:30).
Salary
Confidential; based on experience.
Hiring Channel
Uplers for its client, Manif AI.
About Manif AI
Manif is building infrastructure and a control plane for agentic commerce—a neutral layer that enables AI agents to transact safely across payment providers, protocols, regions, and payment methods while ensuring consumers and merchants remain in control.
The company is working toward a future in which AI agents can discover products, negotiate prices, make purchases, and manage financial workflows on behalf of consumers and businesses.
Manif explains that existing payments infrastructure was not designed for autonomous software. Its platform aims to address this gap by enabling secure and controlled transactions across the global commerce ecosystem.
The company is currently operating in stealth and describes itself as well funded by leading venture investors and strategic partners.
Roles & Responsibilities
Build Automated Testing Infrastructure
- Build automated API, integration, end-to-end, and regression test frameworks.
- Develop AI-assisted test generation from specifications and product requirements.
- Build continuous validation pipelines integrated into CI/CD.
- Create test environments, synthetic data generation systems, and developer tooling.
- Establish automated regression detection and production monitoring.
Performance, Resilience & Reliability Engineering
- Build performance and load testing infrastructure.
- Develop resilience and chaos testing capabilities.
- Validate system behaviour under failures, edge cases, and changing operating conditions.
- Help ensure reliability across distributed systems and financial workflows.
Security & Compliance Validation
- Build security validation practices for financial systems.
- Develop compliance validation capabilities relevant to the platform.
- Ensure testing practices account for correctness, security, reliability, and system resilience.
AI-Native Quality Engineering
- Embed AI deeply throughout the development and validation lifecycle.
- Use AI-assisted test generation from specifications and product requirements.
- Help establish a development process where quality is continuously verified from specification through production.
- Build frameworks and internal engineering tools that support large-scale automated validation.
Must-Have Technical Skills
These are the skills explicitly listed in the opportunity's must-have section.
Qualifications & Experience
Technical Foundation
- Deep technical foundation in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline.
- Strong programming ability in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, or similar languages.
- Ability to build internal engineering tools and automated testing platforms.
Automation & Distributed Systems
- Significant experience building automated testing platforms for distributed systems rather than primarily performing manual testing.
- Experience testing APIs, distributed systems, databases, authentication systems, and cloud-native applications.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD, observability, production monitoring, and release engineering.
Modern Testing Methodologies
- Familiarity with property-based testing.
- Experience or familiarity with fuzz testing.
- Understanding of contract testing and mutation testing.
- Experience with synthetic test data generation.
High-Reliability Systems
- Experience with payment systems, financial infrastructure, or other high-reliability distributed systems is highly desirable.
- Strong attention to correctness, determinism, idempotency, security, resilience, and edge cases.
You'll Probably Thrive Here If You...
- Already use AI as a core part of your daily engineering workflow.
- Believe the future of QA is continuous, automated, and AI-assisted—not manual test execution.
- Think like a software engineer who specializes in quality.
- Can build frameworks that thousands of tests run on, rather than simply writing individual test cases.
- Pay close attention to correctness, determinism, idempotency, security, resilience, and edge cases.
- Enjoy designing systems that prevent defects instead of merely finding them.
- Have high agency, are comfortable with ambiguity, and enjoy creating engineering practices from first principles.
Our Engineering Philosophy
Quality Is Our Identity
Users Above All
High Agency. Low Ego.
Design Creates Leverage
AI-Native by Default
Ideal Candidate
A technically strong QA or Quality Engineering professional with 6+ years of experience who approaches testing as a software engineering discipline. The ideal candidate has built automated testing platforms for distributed systems and can establish AI-assisted, continuous quality validation from the specification stage through production.
- Strong hands-on programming ability in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, or similar languages.
- Experience building scalable automation frameworks and internal engineering tools.
- Understands APIs, databases, authentication, cloud-native applications, and distributed systems.
- Can establish CI/CD validation, observability, performance, and resilience testing.
- Thinks proactively about defect prevention, security, correctness, and reliability.
Application Process
How to Apply Through Uplers
- Click the Apply button and register or log in to the Uplers portal.
- Complete the screening form and upload your updated resume.
- Complete the required application steps to improve your chances of being shortlisted and meeting the client for an interview.
About Uplers
Uplers aims to make hiring reliable, simple, and fast. It supports candidates in finding and applying for relevant opportunities and provides assistance with grievances or challenges during an engagement.
The opportunity description also notes that additional opportunities may be available through the Uplers portal, depending on the assessments candidates clear.
Ready to build AI-native quality engineering?
Apply for the Founding QA Engineer opportunity through the LinkedIn listing.