Quality Automation Architect

Job Description

Job Description

Company Description

At PayNearMe, we're on a mission to make paying and getting paid as simple as possible. We build innovative technology that transforms the way businesses and their customers experience payments. Our industry-leading platform, PayXM™, is the first of its kind—designed to manage the entire payment experience from start to finish. Every click, swipe or tap is seamless, fast and secure, helping non-commerce businesses boost customer satisfaction, accelerate payments, and reduce costs.

Our single platform handles it all: cards, ACH, digital wallets such as PayPal, Venmo, Cash App Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and even cash at more than 62,000 retail locations nationwide. Today, thousands of businesses across consumer lending, iGaming and online sports betting, property management, and tolling trust PayNearMe to deliver a payment experience that drives real results.

In September 2025, we raised a $50 million Series E funding round to accelerate our growth.

We're a team of 300+ employees across 41 states, headquartered in Silicon Valley with satellite offices in Dallas, TX and Holmdel, NJ.

Join us and be part of a team that's shaping the future of payments—one experience at a time.

Responsibilities:

We are establishing the role of Quality Automation Architect to lead the modernization of our software quality management practices, tooling, and mindset. As a payment processor and licensed money transmitter, PayNearMe operates in a regulated, high-stakes environment with a high bar for quality. We're investing heavily in agentic AI workflows that will substantially accelerate how quickly we produce code — and we need our ability to validate that code to scale at the same pace. Your primary objective will be to drive our transformation to a fully automated test suite and deployment pipeline while maintaining our current extremely high quality metrics.

Today, our approach to QA follows a traditional release-validation process, combining automated tests with manual scenarios and post-release smoke testing. As agentic AI accelerates our ability to deliver software, we need to transform the way we think about signals that give us confidence in production readiness. This role is about enabling teams to ship faster and with less friction, while honoring the trust placed in us by our clients and their customers by maintaining a high bar for correctness.

Success in this role requires both technical depth and an ability to work cross-functionally. You will need to both learn and teach, be an agent and driver of change, work within regulatory and compliance frameworks, and get buy-in for transformational initiatives across a diverse product development organization.

• Define and lead the technical approach for modernizing software quality across our engineering organization, evolving from QA-as-gatekeeper toward a shared ownership model
• Assess our current QA processes, test automation, manual testing practices, release validation, and tooling, then develop a practical roadmap for reaching successive levels of maturity
• Propose and implement tooling, workflows and practices for building quality into the agentic SDLC
• Establish a long-term vision for quality management that reduces handoffs and allows development pods to operate with autonomy
• Partner closely with proddev leadership, SGRC, QA, and performance testing teams to align quality management practices with business risk, regulatory needs, and delivery goals
• Define, track, and report the metrics that will shape decisions, such as coverage and defect escape rates

Test Architecture & Automation

• Define a modern test pyramid with clear definitions, ownership, and goals for unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, exploratory, and production validation layers, along with specialized considerations such as performance and security
• Improve the reliability, speed, maintainability, and signal quality of our automated test suites; guide appropriate use of existing tools while identifying opportunities to improve, replace, or supplement them
• Develop strategies for test data management (seed, synthetic, and production-like sets), environment reliability, contract testing, service virtualization, synthetic monitoring, and automated smoke testing
• Identify opportunities to leverage agentic AI in test generation & scenario discovery, and design workflows and skills for multi-agent analysis of generated code

Release Readiness

• Design quality gates that are risk-based, automated where possible, and integrated into CI/CD pipelines
• Improve sandbox and production smoke testing so that post-deploy validation becomes faster, more automated, and more reliable, supporting a fast-rollback strategy when needed
• Collaborate with teams to define what "ready to release" means for different types of changes, services, and risk profiles

Mentorship and Change Leadership

• Provide technical mentorship to QA engineers, software engineers, and engineering leads.
• Teach modern quality engineering practices through pairing, workshops, documentation, architecture reviews, and hands-on examples.
• Build buy-in and drive change across teams by showing practical improvements rather than imposing abstract process changes.
• Help cultivate a culture where quality is owned broadly by engineering, supported by QA expertise, and embedded throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Approach change with empathy, especially for team members whose current roles and responsibilities will evolve.

Success in This Role

• Fully automated quality regression and smoke tests that allow for high confidence releases
• North star: A green build is safe to deploy
• Clearer testing standards across application, service, API, and event-driven boundaries.
• Implement state of the art AI based toolchains to constantly improve confidence in releases, with fewer escaped defects

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in a software development organization, ideally with a significant emphasis on quality management. Our current stack includes Ruby and Go codebases, and direct experience with one of these (preferably both) is a significant benefit.
• Significant experience with agentic software development workflows, skill development, prompt engineering, and supporting tools
• Proficiency with Git and branch management workflows (trunk-based, git-flow, etc); hands-on experience with GitLab for CI/CD strongly preferred
• Excellent communication skills; ability to build consensus and influence across teams, considering multiple perspectives and developing solutions that balance them effectively
• Commitment to data-driven decision making — able to develop and test hypotheses effectively, continually adjusting strategy as a result of new information; defining, tracking, and reporting on clear KPIs/OKRs
• Experience leading transformational projects and managing change well, ideally in sensitive, high-complexity environments with significant compliance or regulatory obligations

The annual base salary range for this role represents PayNearMe's good-faith estimate of the base salary it reasonably expects to offer for this position at the time of hire. Actual compensation may vary based on factors including the candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, and work location. PayNearMe may offer compensation outside of this range in certain circumstances. This position will remain posted until filled.

Annual Salary Range

$205,000—$260,000 USD

Why Join Us?:

• Competitive salary and benefits with growth-company options grant
• Fast- paced and professional work culture
• Stock options with standard startup vesting - 1 year cliff; 4 years total
• $50 monthly communication expense stipend to go towards your phone/internet bill
• $250 stipend to enhance your WFH setup
• Reimbursement for peripheral equipment: monitor (up to $400), keyboard and mouse (up to $200)
• Premium medical benefits including vision and dental (100% coverage for employees)
• Company-sponsored life and disability insurance
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Paid sick leave, jury duty, bereavement
• 401k plan
• Flexible Time Off (our team members typically take off ~3-4 weeks per year)
• Volunteer Time Off
• 13 scheduled holidays

PayNearMe strives to create a workplace where all employees thrive. Our core values represent who we are today and we take pride in the way we work with each other as well as with our stakeholders.

We're in this together to do the right thing . We deliver real results we are proud of while remaining respectful , transparent , and flexible .

PayNearMe is an equal opportunity employer. We are diligently and thoughtfully working towards cultivating a diverse workforce which in turn, enhances our products and services for the communities we serve. Applicants who represent all backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.

CALIFORNIA CONSUMER PRIVACY ACT: APPLICANT NOTICE

Effective Date: January 1, 2020

Last Reviewed on: December 23, 2019

PayNearMe, Inc. (the "Company") is providing you with this Notice ("Notice") to inform you about:

1. the categories of Personal Information that the Company collects and maintains about applicants; and
2. the purposes for which the Company uses that Personal Information.

For purposes of this Notice, "Personal Information" means information that identifies, relates to, describes, is capable of being associated with, or could reasonably be linked, directly or indirectly with, a natural person that the Company may collect in connection with screening applicants for job openings at the Company.

1. Identifiers and Professional or Employment-Related Information. The Company collects identifiers and professional or employment-related information, which may include some or all the following: real name, nickname or alias, postal address, telephone number, e-mail address, membership in professional organizations, professional certifications, language skills, and current and past employment history. The Company collects this Personal Information to evaluate previous job performance and consider applicants for positions, to develop a talent pool and plan for succession, to conduct applicant surveys, to maintain an internal applicant directory and for purposes of identification, to promote the Company as a place to work, and for workforce reporting and data analytics/trend analysis.
2. Personal Information Categories from Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.80(e). The Company may collect categories of Personal Information listed in Cal. Civ. Code §1798.80(e), other than those already listed above, (a) to the extent necessary to comply with the Company's legal obligations, such as to accommodate disabilities; (b) to conduct a direct threat analysis in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and state law; (c) for occupational health and safety compliance and record-keeping; and (d) to respond to an applicant's medical emergency.
3. Characteristics of Protected Classifications Under California or Federal Law. The Company may collect information about race, age, national origin, disability, sex, and veteran status as necessary to comply with legal obligations, including the reporting requirements of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the federal Office of Contracting Compliance Programs (applicable to government contractors), and California's Fair Employment and Housing Act. The Company collects this Personal Information for purposes including: to comply with Federal and California law related to accommodation. The Company also collects this category of Personal Information on a purely voluntary basis, except where required by law, and uses the information only in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
4. Education Information. The Company collects education information such as resumes and graduation records. The Company collects this Personal Information to determine suitability for roles, to determine eligibility for training courses, and to assist with professional licensing.
5. Profile Data. The Company may collect profile data, including the following: psychological assessments, behavior analyses, or other profiling of its applicants. The Company collects this Personal Information to determine aptitude for certain positions and job assignments as well.
6. Background Screening Information. In the event that an applicant is given a formal job offer, the Company collects background screening information prior to hiring, including results of the following types of background screening: criminal history; sex offender registration; motor vehicle records; credit history; employment history; drug testing; and educational history. The Company collects this Personal Information to screen for risks to the Company and its clients, and continued suitability for their jobs and to evaluate applicants for promotions.