(Senior) QA Engineer

We are a growing SaaS start-up with an international team, operating on the intersection between two of the world's most fascinating industries - global shipping and global travel.

Over 90% of global trade depends on ships, and the shipping industry depends on the 2 million seafarers who operate them. What most people don't know is there's a complex, mission-critical travel operation going on 24/7 to bring seafarers to the ships where they're needed, when they're needed. That's called crew logistics, and without it, global trade wouldn't function.

But it's an operation often built on manual processes and legacy systems, meaning high-stress for operators, an unreliable experience for seafarers, and poor outcomes for the industry. That is until Tilla enters the scene.

Backed by strong investor support, with more than 10,000 crew changes executed in the platform each year across over 600 vessels globally, our platform is a game changer in crew logistics, streamlining collaboration between operators and seafarers, making crew operations more humane, efficient, and cost-effective.

Join us on the next chapter of our growth journey and tackle this overlooked yet critical global challenge: every crew change, optimized and digital.

Your mission

Build the quality system that lets Tilla ship quickly and safely: reusable test automation, sound release judgement, and a way of working that makes quality everyone's job in practice. As our first dedicated QA engineer, you will take ownership of work currently shared across engineering, product, design and customer experience.

🧱 Reliable releases at pace / by architecting Tilla's test automation framework

• Designing and building a scalable, reusable end-to-end test framework in Playwright and TypeScript
• Automating coverage of critical user journeys across flight search, travel operations and tenant integrations
• Owning the regression suite and keeping it fast, stable and trusted
• Working with platform engineering to set risk-based thresholds for quality gates in CI

🚦 Protecting customer trust / by keeping critical defects out of production without slowing delivery

• Triaging and prioritising defects by their impact on customers, including confusion as well as functional breakage, and deciding clearly what blocks a release and what does not.
• Running release gates: critical journeys passing, feature flags validated, rollback confirmed
• Own root cause analysis of bugs to find hotspots, and feeding what you learn back into tests and design, to build recurring fixes rather than mere patches.
• Tracking incident count, defect rate and QA feedback latency, and acting on what they show

🧭 Quality as a shared practice / by embedding QA across the product lifecycle

• Reviewing requirements early for testability, covering both functional and non-functional aspects
• Defining test strategy and QA estimates during sprint grooming. Help define guidelines for default edge cases / workflows that need to be covered by engineering, design and product during grooming and hand-off.
• Writing clear test documentation (test plans, test cases and coverage notes) that the wider team can rely on.
• Asking the sharp questions that clarify requirements before they turn into defects

You should have

• Experience: several years in QA engineering, including senior-level ownership of test strategy and automation within a product team
• Experience: hands-on test automation with Playwright and TypeScript (essential); familiarity with a modern web engineering stack is a plus
• Experience: experience or interest in early-stage or growth-stage startups, ideally as the first QA engineer in a team / company.
• Experience: a B2B SaaS background; experience with travel, booking or travel aggregator products is highly preferred
• A track record of designing test frameworks that scale and stay maintainable as the product grows
• Sound judgement on defect management, bug reporting and root cause analysis
• The ability to set a test strategy across unit, integration and end-to-end layers, and to know which risks belong where
• A systems mindset: you build repeatable processes rather than one-off fixes
• Rigorous attention to detail, paired with pragmatism
• Strong product sense and familiarity with standard UX patterns, keeping the user experience front and centre.
• Clear communication with engineering, product, design and customer-facing colleagues, and a habit of asking probing questions early
• Fluency in English. Other languages are a plus.
• Based in Berlin, Munich, or EMEA working remotely with good overlap with the product and engineering team's core hours.

Why Join Us?

• Tackle a unique industry challenge with global impact
• Be part of an international, mission-oriented, supportive and fun team
• Do your best work, with leading-edge AI tools for all team members
• Benefit from support and budget for your learning and development

We believe that employing a diverse workforce is central to our success at Tilla. We make hiring decisions based on your experience and skills. Therefore, we welcome applications from all members of society, regardless of age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion or belief.

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