Phantom
Phantom is the modern money app used by tens of millions around the world. Our product combines everything people need to manage, spend, and grow their money in one simple, intuitive experience. Phantom brings all the control and flexibility of crypto-powered finance, without unnecessary complexity, into mainstream consumer finance.
By combining industry-leading security with thoughtfully designed tools, Phantom makes powerful financial tools feel approachable and easy to use. This focus on speed, control, and user experience has fueled rapid growth, with a community of 20M+ people, reaching #1 in the Google Play Store finance category, and consistently ranking as a Top 50 app across all categories, alongside some of the most recognizable consumer technology platforms in the world.
The Role
We're looking for an SDET for a 6 month contractor position who thinks like an engineer and tests like one too. You won't be writing test cases in a spreadsheet. You'll be designing and owning test infrastructure for financial-grade systems — payment flows, KYC pipelines, card transaction handling, and the compliance rails that underpin them.
This is not a QA role. It's an engineering role that happens to own quality as its primary output surface. You will work embedded in a team that ships production financial software at startup velocity. That means your job is to make speed and correctness coexist — not to be the brake pedal.
What You'll Own
Core Ownership
- Own test coverage for their squad's features end-to-end (unit, integration, E2E)
- Build and maintain automated test suites for new and existing functionality
- Run manual and exploratory testing on features before release
Automation & Infrastructure
- Write reliable, maintainable automated tests (UI, API, regression)
- Contribute to the shared test automation framework
- Integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines and ensure they run reliably on every PR/deploy
Quality Process
- Define and document QA standards within their squad
- Review PRs for testability and test coverage gaps
- Flag flaky tests and own resolution
Collaboration
- Partner with product engineers to shift testing left (writing tests alongside features, not after)
- Work with PM/design to clarify acceptance criteria before dev begins
- Surface quality risks and blockers early in the sprint
Qualifications
Core engineering:
- Strong proficiency in at least one of: Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Go
- Experience designing and building test frameworks from scratch (not just adding tests to an existing suite)
- Deep familiarity with API testing — REST, webhooks, idempotency, retry behavior, edge cases at integration boundaries
- Working knowledge of databases (SQL) and the ability to write test data seeding/cleanup logic correctly
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 out-of-order delivery scenarios
CI/CD and infrastructure:
- Experience integrating test suites into CI pipelines (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 reading service logs/traces
Operational mindset:
- You can define what "this test passing" actually means in production terms
- You've contributed to or owned an incident post-mortem with concrete prevention steps
- You understand canary deployments, feature flags, and how to write tests that survive staged rollouts
What You'll Work On (Day 1 Context)
Your first 90 days will likely include:
- 30 days: map current test coverage against known failure modes; identify the top 3 gaps; ship at least one meaningful test suite that catches a real class of bugs
- 60 days: own CI quality gates for at least one pod's test suite; establish baseline metrics (coverage %, flakiness rate, regression detection latency)
- 90 days: reduce bug escape rate measurably; present a test infrastructure roadmap to the team
How We Measure Success
- Bug escape rate (regressions caught in test vs. caught in production)
- Time-to-detection for regressions (commit to test failure)
- Test flakiness rate (< 2% target)
- Manual testing time eliminated via automation
- CI pipeline reliability and run time
Red Flags We Screen For
- Test suites that only cover the happy path
- No incident ownership story ("QA doesn't do oncall")
- Can't reason about failure modes, retries, or idempotency at the code level
- Treats test coverage % as the goal rather than a signal
- Cannot explain the business impact of a quality gap
What We Offer
- Work on infrastructure that handles real money for millions of users
- A team that treats quality as a first-class engineering problem, not a compliance checkbox
- Remote-friendly with a distributed, high-ownership engineering culture.
We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds to apply. We believe that our work is stronger with a variety of perspectives, and we’re eager to further diversify our company. If you have a background that you feel would make an impact at Phantom, please consider applying. We’re committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do 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.
