Senior Software Engineer in Test (SDET)

## About Nivelo: **Everyone deserves to be paid reliably.** Nivelo’s mission is to provide safe and instantaneous money movement for everyone. Our ambition is large - disrupting a $20 Trillion infrastructure built 50 years ago. Our impact is even bigger - securing the most common and most important payment for most people in the world - their paycheck. We're reinventing the way businesses and individuals move money. Nivelo is the integrated payments platform that payroll brands use to move money quickly, digitally and securely to guarantee every dollar is delivered on time. We were recently featured in [J.P. Morgan's Payments Unbound Magazine](https://www.jpmorgan.com/payments/payments-unbound/magazine/articles/nyc-fintech-world-hotspot) as one of the top five fintechs making waves in NYC's booming payments ecosystem. The company is backed by investors such as FirstMark Capital, Parameter Ventures, and Anthemis that have taken countless companies to IPO (think Shopify and Airbnb). Investors also include experienced operators in the payment and risk space, including the COO of Stripe, Founder of Tenable, and senior operators at Chime, Stripe, Alloy, and Justworks. Want to learn more? Check out this interview on the [Payrollin Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjtqRDRAppM). ## **About you:** You are: - **A Test Automation Expert**: Deep experience designing and building automated test suites and frameworks, with strong coding skills in TypeScript/JavaScript and experience with modern testing tools (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Jest). - **Rigorous and Detail-Oriented**: You think in edge cases and failure modes: the rounding errors, race conditions, retries, boundary conditions, cutoff times, and bank holidays that others may miss. When money is on the line, "probably fine" isn't good enough. - **Deeply User- and Domain-Curious**: You're curious about who uses our product and why. You think from the user's perspective first: payroll and treasury professionals under real pressure. You want to learn how ACH, wires, and NACHA rules actually work, because that's where the edge cases live. - **AI-Native**: You already work alongside coding agents every day. You know where AI-generated code and tests go wrong (tautological assertions, tests quietly edited until they pass, logic that looks right but isn't) and you build systems that catch it. - **Quality-Obsessed but Pragmatic**: You raise the quality bar for the whole team without becoming a bottleneck, and you know the difference between coverage that matters and coverage for its own sake. - **A Proactive Problem Solver**: You don't wait for instructions—you identify gaps, propose solutions, and take ownership of results. - **Flexible**: You’re excited to dive in where needed to meet our clients’ needs. - **A Clear Communicator**: Whether it's explaining the root cause of a flaky test to an engineer or communicating risk during a payroll incident, you keep stakeholders aligned and informed. - **Operationally Reliable**: You thrive under pressure, stay calm during incidents, and prioritize rapid, effective solutions. *This is not a job for someone who wants to sit in the backseat. If you’re the kind of engineer who thrives on responsibility, ownership, and building something that matters, we want to hear from you.* ## Requirements - Experience designing scalable, maintainable test automation frameworks and infrastructure for high-performance web applications - Experience with performance/load testing and contract testing - Experience working on high-stakes, detail-oriented products where correctness and reliability are non-negotiable - Experience building and testing web applications professionally for 6+ years, with 3+ years focused on test automation in some combination of TypeScript/JavaScript (bonus points for python experience) - Experience with SQL/relational databases (you'll be generating and managing test and seed data) - Hand-on AI experience — You use coding agents daily and have built infrastructure that makes them more reliable, such as test harnesses, evals, or tools agents can call. You've built production grade AI workflows with self-correcting loops and evaluation frameworks, or you personally orchestrate multi-agent workflows day-to-day. You have a clear point of view on where AI-generated code and tests fail, and how to catch it. - Experience at a small startup (bonus points if it was a fintech startup) ## Nice to Have - Performance/load testing and contract testing experience, especially contract tests against third-party APIs - Familiarity with ACH/NACHA, wires, or payment operations - Property-based or mutation testing - Building evaluation frameworks for LLM-powered product features - Working within SOC 2 or other audited change-management processes ## You’ll Be Working On - **Testing Infrastructure:** - Improve our testing infrastructure and tooling so every engineer can write and run reliable tests faster. - Build synthetic data generators and third-party simulators (bank partners, payroll platforms, third party providers) for local testing and demos: realistic scenarios, with no real PII or bank data. - Integrate testing into CI/CD, tighten feedback loops, and make quality checks a seamless part of the development workflow. - **AI-Accelerated Quality:** - Build the harness that lets AI coding agents write, run, and verify changes safely, including simulators and data tools agents can call directly (e.g., via MCP). - Produce structured, machine-readable test results so agents and engineers can diagnose failures without digging through logs. - Write down our testing standards (e.g., as agent skills and instructions) so AI-written tests meet our bar by default, and use techniques like mutation testing to check the tests themselves. - Design evaluation frameworks for Nivelo's future AI-powered features, such as risk scoring and KYB review. - **Regression & Test Coverage:** - Expand automated regression testing across critical money-movement workflows so we can ship continuously without breaking existing behavior. - Encode financial invariants (money in equals money out, ledgers balance, files conform to NACHA format) as property-based and invariant tests. - Grow and balance coverage across unit, integration, contract, end-to-end and visual tests, prioritizing the flows where a defect would have real financial or client impact. - Reduce flakiness and keep the suite fast and trustworthy, so failures mean something. - Turn production incidents and support tickets into regression tests, and report on coverage and quality trends. - **Test Planning & Edge Cases:** - Write test plans that ensure all edge cases are considered (boundary conditions, concurrency, idempotency, partial failures, error handling, and timing such as cutoff windows, bank holidays, and effective dates) before they ever reach production. - Test across the combinations of client configurations our multi-tenant platform supports. - Partner with engineers early to shift testing left, surfacing risk areas during design rather than after release. - **Product & Engineering Collaboration:** - Work with product and engineering to define clear acceptance criteria and turn high-level requirements into verifiable test cases. - Champion quality practices across the team, raising the bar without becoming the sole owner of quality. ## Why Join Nivelo: You will: - become an expert in how money moves and your work will become the face of payroll for the United States, defining how money movement for high stakes payments should be experienced. - build the quality systems that let a lean, AI-native team ship like a much larger one. - work with a small team of exceptional, intelligent and kind people - earn a competitive salary while still having the impact you can only have at an early stage company - receive a generous stock option allotment - have health/vision/dental insurance options through Justworks - have access to an educational stipend to continue building your skills and knowledge - work from wherever you work best (with east coast core hours). Our team is fully remote. Please note that an onboarding visit to the Nivelo office may be required for this position. Please let us know if you have any questions. *At Nivelo, we are committed to maintaining and celebrating the diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity in our organization.*