Senior QA Automation Engineer (Financial Apps)
Castle Island Ventures is a venture capital firm focused exclusively on public blockchains, investing in early-stage companies at the intersection of traditional finance and public blockchains.
About Castle Island Ventures
Castle Island Ventures is a venture capital firm focused exclusively on public blockchains. Their mission is to support entrepreneurs building the infrastructure and application companies required to help transformative blockchain protocols reach their full potential. They describe their focus as 'accelerating frictionless finance,' investing in early-stage companies operating at the intersection of traditional finance and public blockchains. The firm also produces a podcast and newsletter covering topics in this space, and maintains a portfolio of companies whose open roles are listed on their jobs board.
Skills
About the Role
As a QA professional in this role, you will manually test flows across complex financial and Web3 scenarios, own quality end to end, and contribute to building automation across backend APIs and frontend interfaces in a fast paced environment. You will leverage AI agents to accelerate your workflow, dig into logs and monitoring tools such as Datadog and Sentry to understand why something broke, and collaborate with engineers to improve the systems you are checking. You will balance manual testing with automation and maintain a product minded focus on quality.
Requirements
- Quality-First: You hold a high bar for manual QA and find genuine satisfaction in exploratory testing, edge-case hunting, and breaking things before users do.
- Comfortable in Both Modes: You can build automation, but you're happy to spend a significant portion of your time on manual testing. You see both as core to the role.
- Technically Capable: 3+ years in QA, including hands-on experience building automation across the full stack (Frontend & Backend), preferably with TypeScript.
- Crypto-Technical: You have a strong grasp of blockchain fundamentals, the end-to-end transaction lifecycle, and the logic behind DeFi protocols like staking and bridging.
- AI-Fluent: You already use AI tools to force-multiply your output and analyze complex errors more efficiently.
- Adaptive: You learn multiple domains quickly and thrive in a fast-paced environment that moves at the speed of crypto.
- Analytical: When you see an error, your first instinct is to look at the logs and find the why.
Responsibilities
- Holistic Quality Ownership: You own the quality of the product end-to-end. You don't just test against a spec; you analyze the spec, find the logical gaps, and suggest improvements to ensure a better final product.
- Hands-On Manual Testing: You design and execute thorough manual test plans across complex financial and Web3 flows. This is the heart of the role.
- AI-Powered Velocity: You leverage AI agents (e.g., Claude Code) to accelerate your workflow, expand coverage, and ship faster without sacrificing depth.
- Deep-Dive Analysis: You are comfortable digging into logs and monitoring tools (Datadog/Sentry) to understand why something broke. You aren't afraid to get your hands dirty in the backend to find the root cause.
- Contribute to Automation: When you're not running manual flows, you help build and maintain automation across backend APIs and frontend interfaces in a fast-paced environment.
- Product Partnership: You don't see yourself as a tester. You are an engineer with a product mindset who actively works to improve the systems you are checking.