QA Engineer - Manual Backend Testing

About Nexla Nexla is the leading Integration platform, built with AI, for AI. Nexla takes a metadata driven approach to converge diverse integrations across Data, Documents, Agents, Applications, and APIs into a single design pattern. We accelerate the development of solutions for GenAI, Analytics, and Inter-company data. Nexla makes data users and developers up to 10x more productive by delivering a true blend of no-code, low-code, and pro-code interfaces. Leading companies including DoorDash, LinkedIn, Johnson & Johnson, and LiveRamp trust Nexla for mission-critical data. Named in the 2022, 2023, and 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Data Integration Tools and top-rated by customers on Gartner Peer Insights, Nexla is a remote-first company headquartered in San Mateo, California. At Nexla, our culture is built around our core values: Have Empathy, Be Curious, Be Intellectually Honest, Achieve Excellence, and Remember to Relax. We put our customers at the heart of everything we do, foster a data-driven mindset, take ownership of our work, and believe in the power of teamwork to achieve ambitious goals. Role You will spend a meaningful part of your time doing deep, thoughtful manual testing to understand system behavior, uncover edge cases, and validate real world scenarios that automation alone cannot catch. Automation supports your work, it does not replace judgment. If you enjoy understanding how systems actually work under the hood and take pride in breaking them in smart ways, this role is for you. Responsibilities • Own backend quality for core platform components including services, connectors, and data pipelines • Perform deep manual testing of backend workflows, edge cases, and failure scenarios • Validate data ingestion, transformations, metadata handling, and downstream consistency • Test service to service interactions, async processes, retries, and error handling • Analyze logs, traces, and metrics to identify defects and system gaps • Design and maintain backend focused automated tests where they add real value • Partner with engineers early in the development cycle to influence design for testability • Reproduce complex production like issues in lower environments • Ensure backward compatibility and data safety during platform changes • Continuously improve test strategies for backend and platform level features Qualifications • 4 to 6 years of experience in backend or platform QA • Strong fundamentals in backend systems, microservices, and distributed architectures • Proven experience in manual backend testing beyond scripted test cases • Solid understanding of data flows, schemas, and data validation techniques • Hands on experience working with databases and writing SQL queries Comfort working with logs, debugging tools, and server side error analysis Experience with automation frameworks for backend testing, with good judgment on what to automate Ability to think in scenarios, not just requirements Nice to have • Experience testing data integration, ETL, or metadata driven platforms • Exposure to cloud based systems and containerized environments • Basic scripting or coding skills in Java, Python, or similar • Familiarity with CI pipelines from a quality ownership perspective • Experience handling production incidents or postmortems Why Build Your Future at Nexla? We are standing at the precipice of the GenAI revolution, but the biggest bottleneck isn't the models, it's the data. By joining Nexla, you aren’t just entering a company; you are stepping into the critical layer of the modern data stack that powers the AI economy. We are the Data Fabric that enables industry titans like LinkedIn, DoorDash, and J&J to turn messy, siloed data into ready-to-use products for RAG and predictive models. This is your opportunity to move beyond simple tooling and build the actual infrastructure that democratizes data access for the next decade of innovation. If you want to solve the hardest problems in data engineering and own a piece of a market projected to hit billions, your career belongs here. Apply tot his job