Role: Functional QA Lead Credit Card Processing & Test Automation
Location: Berkeley Heights, NJ 5 days a week onsite
Experience: 8 12+ years
Domain: Credit Card Issuer Processing / Banking / Payments
Job Description
We are seeking an experienced, hands-on Functional QA Lead with strong credit card issuer processing domain knowledge and expertise in functional testing, test automation, and data reconciliation.
The ideal candidate will lead end-to-end quality assurance activities, develop comprehensive functional test strategies, drive automation initiatives, and ensure business correctness across complex credit card processing platforms. Experience in legacy mainframe modernization, distributed architecture, and validation between legacy and modernized platforms is highly desirable.
Key Responsibilities
1. Functional Testing & Domain Expertise
- Lead end-to-end functional testing of credit card issuer processing capabilities.
- Design and execute complex business scenarios covering:
- Account lifecycle and maintenance
- Authorization, clearing, settlement, and transaction posting
- Payments, repayment, credit allocation, and reversals
- Credit limits, available credit (OTB), and balance calculations
- Billing cycles, statement generation, interest, and fee calculations
- Delinquency, collections, charge-offs, and recoveries
- Disputes, chargebacks, refunds, and adjustments
- End-of-day, month-end, and batch processing
- Validate complex business rules, financial calculations, and transaction behavior.
- Identify positive, negative, boundary, exception, and cross-cycle testing scenarios.
2. Test Automation Strategy & Implementation
- Define and implement a scalable functional test automation strategy.
- Lead automation development across API, integration, batch, and end-to-end business workflows.
- Develop and maintain reusable, data-driven automated regression suites.
- Automate complex credit card scenarios, including payment allocation, billing, balance calculations, and transaction processing.
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to enable continuous quality validation.
- Establish automation standards, reusable frameworks, test data management, and reporting.
- Identify opportunities to automate legacy-to-modern platform comparisons, financial reconciliations, and data validation.
- Improve regression efficiency, automation reliability, execution speed, and defect detection.
- Work closely with developers and DevOps teams to enable shift-left testing.
3. Data Validation & Reconciliation
- Lead source-to-target data validation between legacy and modernized systems.
- Validate business rules, data mappings, lineage, and transformation accuracy.
- Perform field-level, record-level, account-level, and financial reconciliation.
- Validate file layouts, matching keys, record counts, control totals, and reporting accuracy.
- Develop automated comparison and reconciliation capabilities for large-volume datasets.
- Investigate discrepancies, identify root causes, and coordinate defect resolution.
- Support parallel-run validation, regression baselines, and historical data comparisons.
4. Test Planning, Execution & Quality Governance
- Own test strategy, test planning, execution, and release-readiness assessments.
- Lead functional, system integration, regression, and end-to-end testing.
- Ensure comprehensive coverage through requirements traceability and risk-based testing.
- Establish test entry/exit criteria and functional quality gates.
- Manage defects, perform triage, track resolution, and drive retesting.
- Monitor quality metrics, including functional coverage, automation coverage, execution results, defect leakage, and reconciliation accuracy.
- Provide transparent reporting on testing progress, risks, and release readiness.
5. QA Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Lead and mentor functional QA engineers and automation engineers.
- Review functional scenarios, automated test scripts, test data, and validation evidence.
- Collaborate with business analysts, product owners, engineering teams, and architects.
- Ensure alignment between business requirements, automation coverage, and functional validation.
- Champion continuous improvement and an automation-first, risk-based testing culture.
Required Skills & Qualifications
- 8+ years of QA experience, including functional QA leadership and automation.
- Strong hands-on experience in credit card issuer processing.
- Deep understanding of payments, billing, credit allocation, balances, interest, fees, and delinquency.
- Demonstrated experience designing and implementing functional test automation frameworks.
- Hands-on experience with automation technologies such as Java/Python, REST Assured, Selenium, Playwright, Cucumber/BDD, or equivalent frameworks.
- Strong API testing and automation experience.
- Advanced SQL skills for data validation, reconciliation, and defect investigation.
- Experience automating batch processing validation, backend workflows, and large-volume data comparisons.
- Experience with CI/CD integration using Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.
- Experience in test management and defect tracking using Jira, Xray, or equivalent tools.
- Strong analytical, communication, problem-solving, and team leadership skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in mainframe-to-distributed or cloud modernization programs.
- Knowledge of COBOL copybooks, JCL, flat files, and batch processing.
- Experience with event-driven systems, microservices, Kafka, or distributed processing.
- Experience automating source-to-target validation and reconciliation across heterogeneous systems.
- Familiarity with performance and volume testing considerations for large-scale transaction processing.
- Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements applicable to credit card issuing.
- Exposure to AI-assisted test generation, intelligent regression selection, and automated defect analysis.
Key Success Metrics
- Functional test coverage across critical issuer processing capabilities.
- Automated regression coverage and reduction in manual execution effort.
- Reliability and effectiveness of automated test suites.
- Financial reconciliation accuracy and reduced unresolved variances.
- Defect detection effectiveness and reduced production defect leakage.
- Test execution efficiency and CI/CD quality gate effectiveness.
- Release readiness and overall functional quality.
Ideal Candidate
A hands-on Functional QA Lead with strong credit card domain knowledge and automation expertise, capable of independently understanding complex business processes, designing comprehensive test scenarios, developing scalable automation solutions, and leading functional validation across legacy and modernized platforms.
The candidate must demonstrate strong analytical skills, ownership of quality outcomes, and the ability to combine domain-driven functional testing with automation to improve speed, accuracy, and reliability.
Most importantly: The QA Lead should be able to write or review automation code, design reusable frameworks, and investigate complex domain discrepancies, not simply manage a team of automation engineers.
For this role, I would make credit card issuer domain expertise, SQL/data analysis, and hands-on backend/API automation mandatory, while treating specific tools such as Flink, MongoDB flexible
