Quality Assurance Engineer

QA Engineer — Founding AU Quality Seat

Sydney, Hybrid

$120-130k + Super + ESOP

Talent Forge is recruiting on behalf of our client, a venture-backed Online Commerce start-up - for their first dedicated QA hire in Australia.

This is a rare opportunity to build the quality function from the ground up — not join an existing playbook, but create your own vision and practise.

The role:

Our client's platform combines a wide integration surface with a non-deterministic core — agentic workflows operating across Shopify, Gorgias, Zendesk, WMS providers, carriers, and ERPs. You'll own quality end-to-end: sit in on design, plan the testing, build the automation, run manual and exploratory work, and make the release call.

What you'll do:

• Take features from spec to sign-off, owning the quality bar throughout
• Build and maintain automated tests (API, integration, E2E UI) using Playwright or Cypress
• Lead hands-on manual and exploratory testing — especially around agent behaviour, where "right" isn't a simple assertion
• Validate integrations against sandboxes and contracts across a large connector ecosystem
• Test event-sourced and async flows (Kafka, Azure Service Bus, Temporal)
• Partner with the Senior AI Software Engineer to build eval harnesses for LLM-driven, non-deterministic behaviour
• Champion quality gates and flakiness standards in CI

What you bring:

• Strong hands-on automation skills — TypeScript and/or Python, Playwright or Cypress, REST/API testing
• Sharp manual and exploratory testing instincts
• A track record of true ownership — you can take a feature and drive it to done
• Comfort operating in a fast, ambiguous, early-stage environment
• Bonus: experience testing LLM/agentic systems or building eval frameworks, e-commerce/Shopify exposure, or experience with distributed/event-sourced systems

Details:

• Location: Sydney — hybrid (Mon/Tue/Fri in the Surry Hills office, Wed/Thu WFH)
• Start: ASAP
• Reports to: CTO & Co-Founder

This is a founding seat with real influence — you'll shape how the engineering team evaluates non-deterministic systems and set the quality bar as the company scales.

Interested? Apply now or reach out to Talent Forge for a confidential discussion.