See yourself being part of a large, transformational change? This could be the role for you!
Role purpose
The Quality Assurance Engineer is responsible for ensuring the stability, functionality, and effectiveness of the Hermes suite of products, an advanced institutional equity trading system for South African stockbrokers.
While the core function of this role is Quality Assurance, it operates with the breadth and depth of a Systems Analyst. This role is much broader than pure testing; it requires an analytical thinker who can look beyond individual bugs to understand system-wide behavior, complex interactions, and the broader financial infrastructure.
This is a high-impact role operating in a live trading environment. The Quality Assurance Engineer will act as the primary point of contact for investigating complex production issues, often under significant time constraints. The ability to maintain composure and think clearly under pressure during critical incidents is essential to success in this position..
Operational Context & Technical Complexity
This position requires a candidate capable of navigating a sophisticated, high-performance trading environment. The Hermes suite is built on a Delphi-based client/server architecture, utilizing proprietary TCP/IP protocols for communication between multiple distributed server components and the frontend.
Deep Diagnostic Capability: This role demands more than functional UI testing. The candidate will be required to analyze application logs and FIX messages to diagnose communication breakdowns and data inconsistencies between distributed components.
Pattern Recognition in Complex Failures: The candidate must be capable of identifying patterns in intermittent or "non-deterministic" issues (often caused by race conditions or network timing) by correlating events across multiple log files.
Performance Awareness: In institutional trading, speed matters. The candidate is expected to recognize performance degradation and help investigate whether delays are due to network lag, database execution, or application processing.
Strategic Manual Validation: In the absence of a pre-existing automation framework, the candidate must design rigorous manual validation strategies. This requires the ability to think abstractly about "what could go wrong" beyond the happy path.
Critical Operational Standards: Operating within a live institutional trading environment means that system failure carries significant financial and regulatory risk. Precision, thoroughness, and a "zero-defect" mindset are required to manage these operational risks effectively..