SDET at Phantom

About Phantom

Phantom is the modern money app utilized by tens of millions globally. Our product integrates everything individuals need to manage, spend, and grow their money into one simple, intuitive experience. Phantom seamlessly brings the control and flexibility of crypto-powered finance into mainstream consumer finance, removing unnecessary complexity. By combining industry-leading security with thoughtfully designed tools, Phantom makes powerful financial tools accessible and easy to use. This focus on speed, control, and user experience has driven rapid growth, culminating in a community of over 20 million users, achieving the #1 spot in the Google Play Store finance category, and consistently ranking as a Top 50 app across all categories, alongside some of the world's most recognized consumer technology platforms.

The Role

We are seeking an SDET for a 6-month contractor position, someone who possesses an engineering mindset and applies it to testing. This role involves designing and owning test infrastructure for financial-grade systems, including payment flows, KYC pipelines, card transaction handling, and the underlying compliance rails. This is fundamentally an engineering role where quality is the primary output. You will be embedded within a team that delivers production financial software at startup velocity, meaning your core responsibility is to ensure both speed and correctness coexist.

What You'll Own

Core Ownership

• Own end-to-end test coverage for your squad's features, encompassing unit, integration, and E2E tests.
• Build and maintain automated test suites for both new and existing functionality.
• Execute manual and exploratory testing on features prior to release.

Automation & Infrastructure

• Develop reliable and maintainable automated tests (UI, API, regression).
• Contribute to the shared test automation framework.
• Integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring reliable execution on every pull request and deployment.

Quality Process

• Define and document Quality Assurance (QA) standards within your squad.
• Review pull requests for testability and identify any test coverage gaps.
• Flag flaky tests and take ownership of their resolution.

Collaboration

• Partner with product engineers to implement shift-left testing, integrating test writing alongside feature development.
• Collaborate with Product Management (PM) and design teams to clarify acceptance criteria before development commences.
• Early identification and communication of quality risks and blockers within the sprint cycle.

Qualifications

Core engineering:

• Strong proficiency in at least one of Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, or Go.
• Experience designing and building test frameworks from scratch, not just adding tests to an existing suite.
• Deep familiarity with API testing, including REST, webhooks, idempotency, retry behavior, and edge cases at integration boundaries.
• Working knowledge of databases (SQL) and the ability to correctly write test data seeding and cleanup logic.

Financial systems (strong preference, will train for the right engineer):

• Experience testing payment flows, ledger systems, or compliance pipelines.
• Understanding of idempotency, double-spend prevention, and eventual consistency in distributed systems.
• Familiarity with webhook-based event systems and scenarios involving out-of-order delivery.

CI/CD and infrastructure:

• Experience integrating test suites into CI pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar).
• Ability to instrument tests for flakiness detection, coverage tracking, and runtime performance.
• Comfort operating in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP) and proficiently reading service logs/traces.

Operational mindset:

• Ability to define what "this test passing" truly signifies in production terms.
• Experience contributing to or owning an incident post-mortem, including proposing concrete prevention steps.
• Understanding of canary deployments, feature flags, and how to write tests that are robust during staged rollouts.

What You'll Work On (Day 1 Context)

Your first 90 days will likely involve:

• 30 days: Mapping current test coverage against known failure modes; identifying the top 3 gaps; shipping at least one meaningful test suite that effectively catches a real class of bugs.
• 60 days: Owning CI quality gates for at least one team's test suite; establishing baseline metrics (e.g., coverage percentage, flakiness rate, regression detection latency).
• 90 days: Measurably reducing the bug escape rate; presenting a test infrastructure roadmap to the team.

How We Measure Success

• Bug escape rate (regressions caught in test versus those caught in production).
• Time-to-detection for regressions (from commit to test failure).
• Test flakiness rate (target: less than 2%).
• Reduction in manual testing time achieved through automation.
• CI pipeline reliability and run time efficiency.

Red Flags We Screen For

• Test suites that only cover the "happy path" scenarios.
• A lack of incident ownership experience (e.g., asserting "QA doesn't do on-call").
• Inability to reason about failure modes, retries, or idempotency at the code level.
• Treating test coverage percentage as an end goal rather than a diagnostic signal.
• Inability to explain the business impact of a quality gap.

What We Offer

• The opportunity to work on infrastructure that handles real money for millions of users.
• A team culture that prioritizes quality as a first-class engineering problem, not merely a compliance checkbox.
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.
• A remote-friendly environment with a distributed, high-ownership engineering culture.

We strongly encourage candidates from all different backgrounds to apply. We believe that our work is stronger with a variety of perspectives, and we are eager to further diversify our company. If you possess a background you believe would significantly impact Phantom, please consider applying. We are committed to building an inclusive, supportive environment for you to perform the best work of your career. By submitting your resume and application materials, you acknowledge and agree that Phantom may use automated tools, including AI systems, and may engage trusted third-party service providers to process your application and ensure an efficient hiring process. Phantom does not sell your information, and your materials will be handled securely and in accordance with applicable data protection laws.