CDD/Freelance QA Engineer

About
Swan is the leading European fintech specialized in embedded banking. A laureate of the French government’s selective year list of tech champions, “French Tech Next 120,” we are quickly expanding across Europe.
Over 100 European companies have already seamlessly integrated banking services such as accounts, cards, and payments into their products through our Banking-as-a-Service platform. This approach, known as “embedded finance”, empowers businesses to elevate their offerings and create new revenue streams — often times tripling their revenue!
Our founders’ vision from the beginning was Simplicity: that anyone with a fintech idea at 2 am can visit our website, start building, and buy themselves a coffee with a self-issued card the very next day. That vision has taken us far.
Following a 38M€ Series B round last September, we have been doubling our headcount and already have over 230 Swanees across offices in Paris, Bordeaux, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Milan! If you’re excited about joining a European fintech adventure, Swan is the way!
To learn more about us:About Swan;Our story.
Job description
In this role, you will be the QA reference for two product squads at Swan: KYC/Onboarding (how individuals and companies open an account and get verified) and Capital Deposit (how entrepreneurs deposit share capital to incorporate their company). You will join the QA team, which works with every product squad so that Swan ships reliable banking features to its partners. The QA team is small, experienced and close-knit: we share practices and back each other up.
✨ Your mission
Your main mission is to ensure the quality of everything the KYC/Onboarding and Capital Deposit squads release for the duration of the contract, while reducing the automated-test debt on these flows and making good use of AI to test faster and better.
✨ Main Tasks

• Get up to speed quickly on the onboarding and capital deposit flows, their business rules and their regulatory constraints, and take over QA activities in both squads.

• Analyze specifications and user stories with Product Managers and engineers, raising ambiguities, missing rules and risks early (shift left).

• Design risk-based test strategies and functional test cases (ISTQB techniques: equivalence partitioning, boundary values, decision tables, state transitions…) for new features.

• Execute functional, exploratory and regression testing (UI and API), and validate releases.

• Automate E2E scenarios with Cucumber (Gherkin) and Playwright (TypeScript) to cover new features and close the existing automation gap, and maintain the existing test suites.

• Maintain the test repository (Qase) and the requirements repository so that requirements, test cases and coverage stay accurate and traceable.

• Report bugs clearly, qualify bugs reported by others, follow them up to resolution, and take part in root-cause analyses and post-mortems.

• Prioritize your work across two squads, and keep both teams informed of test status, risks and blockers.

• Use AI tools (Claude) to speed up test analysis, test design and test automation, critically review what the AI produces, and share good practices with the QA team.

✨ Curious about your future team?
In this part please provide a short 3 to 4 line paragraph that gives us the scoop on the team such as the composition, internal structure, operational approach, key stakeholders, and any other detail of the team.
You will join a QA team of 4 QA engineers and a QA Platform Engineer led by the QA Manager, inside an Engineering organization of [X]+ people. Each QA engineer is embedded in one or more product squads (4 to 8 engineers with a dedicated Product Manager) that plan their roadmap quarterly and deploy as they go. Day to day, you will work closely with the engineers, Engineering Managers and Product Managers of the KYC/Onboarding and Capital Deposit squads, and with other QA team members.
Within the QA team, we share a common automation framework, common tools (Qase, Linear, Notion, GitHub, home-made requirement repository tool) and an AI-assisted QA pipeline that we keep improving together.
Our technical environment:

• E2E test automation: Cucumber (Gherkin) + Playwright (TypeScript)

• Test management: Qase; requirements repository linked to test cases

• Project management & documentation: Linear, Notion; code & CI: GitHub

• AI: Claude / Claude Code, used across the QA team to support test analysis, test design and automation

• Swan's public API is GraphQL

Preferred experience
✨ You’re a great match if:

• You are a confirmed QA Engineer / software tester (around 4+ years of experience), ideally in an agile product team

• You can work with several teams at once: you prioritize, you say what will and won't be done, and you keep everyone informed.

• You are comfortable testing APIs (GraphQL or REST) as well as web interfaces.

• You have hands-on experience with test automation, ideally Playwright and/or Cucumber/Gherkin, and you are comfortable reading and writing TypeScript (or a similar language).

• You build good relationships easily, you communicate clearly in writing and out loud, and you can explain a risk or a bug to an engineer, a PM or a business stakeholder alike.

• You already use AI tools (Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT…) in your testing work, or you are keen to, and you keep a critical eye on what they produce.

• Experience in banking, fintech or another regulated industry is a strong plus.

• You know the ISTQB concepts and vocabulary (test levels, test techniques, risk-based testing, defect lifecycle) and apply them pragmatically. An ISTQB certification is a plus.

• Languages: you are fluent in English and French.

• Our ideal teammate: Sociable. Skilled. Empathetic. Frank. We love to challenge each other, and we leave our egos at the door 🙂

It’s okay if you don’t tick all the boxes — don’t let imposter syndrome prevent you from applying! 🙌
Swan is committed to providing a caring work environment for all employees, regardless of age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, or belief.
When it comes to recruitment, we’re interested in your work experience, skills, and overall personality. Because diversity makes the workplace stronger and is necessary for Swan’s success, we are intensifying efforts to incorporate concrete actions to help us improve in this area.
About Swan
✨ Our values:
Swan’s core values guide our actions daily. Individually, they may seem obvious, but together, they form a unique culture.
Simplicity: Leonardo Da Vinci said: “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” If something's convoluted or confusing, we work extra hard to break it down. - Making complex things simple is what we do.
Long Term: We always play the long game, whether it's to support our partners in their growth journey, or make tangible commitments to climate action.
Excellence: We are a team of experts who consistently go all out to create pixel-perfect banking services and exceed our partners' expectations— whatever it takes.
Be Human: We believe in the power of kindness and the importance of acting with integrity. But embracing our humanity extends beyond interpersonal interactions, it means caring about greater issues that affect our planet.
You can find out more about our culture.
Recruitment process

• A 30-min video call with our Talent Acquisition Manager, to get to know you, understand your career expectations and answer your questions

• Hiring Manager interview

• Case study

• Peer Interview automation, test execution, collaboration

• Last interview with our CTO

Originally posted on Himalayas