Functional Lead - QA

Functional Lead - QA (Clearing, Settlement & Payments)

Experience Required: 6 to 8 Yrs

Job Location: Lower Parel, Mumbai (Mon-Fri - WFO)

We are looking for a detail-driven Functional Lead to own test quality for the most business-critical modules of a leading Indian depository: clearing and settlement, and payment systems. You will understand each requirement from the business point of view, catch what others miss, and speak up early about dependencies, blockers and risks so that every release goes live with confidence.

Key Responsibilities:

Domain & Functional Exposure:

• Hands-on functional testing of complex financial application around Pledging of shares, clearing and settlement, payment systems, IPO Process, Corporate actions or similar transaction-intensive financial platforms.
• Good understanding of trade and settlement life cycles, payment flows, reconciliation, cut-offs and exception handling.
• Ability to turn business requirements into test scenarios, including negative, boundary and corner cases ranked by business criticality.
• Working knowledge of preparing test data that is critical, sensitive or interdependent.

Requirement Understanding: Analyse requirements from the business point of view, clarify gaps and ambiguities with business analysts and the client, and confirm shared understanding before testing begins.

Dependencies & Data Criticality: Map upstream and downstream system, interface, environment and data dependencies. Make sure critical test data is available, accurate and protected.

Feature Readiness & Partial Deployments: Check that each feature is ready for testing before the cycle starts. Assess what a partial feature deployment means for test scope, regression and business risk, and plan coverage to match.

Test Coverage & Corner Cases: Gauge coverage against business criticality, find gaps, and identify the corner cases most likely to cause failures in production.

Defects & Blockers: Track defects that block or slow test cycles, push for fast triage and fixes, and turn each issue into a clear action with an owner and a date.

Risk & Delay Call-outs: Raise dependency, coverage and schedule risks early and assertively, backed by facts and impact, so that decisions are made in time.

Peer Review: Review test scenarios, test cases and results prepared by peers for accuracy, completeness and business relevance.

Team Coordination & Impediment Removal: Coordinate across testers, developers, business analysts and environment teams, clear impediments quickly, and keep the team working in harmony.

Key KPIs & Success Measures:

• Requirement coverage: share of business requirements and critical flows mapped to test scenarios.
• Critical scenario coverage: corner cases and high-risk flows covered in each module.
• Defect leakage: defects found in UAT or production that should have been caught earlier.
• Blocker turnaround: number and age of blocking defects, and time taken to resolve them.
• Test cycle adherence: planned against actual execution, and days lost to dependencies or environment issues.
• Readiness accuracy: features accepted into testing that turned out not to be ready.
• Review effectiveness: issues found in peer reviews before test execution.
• Team health: impediments raised and closed, and smooth coordination with no avoidable escalations.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, commerce, finance or a related field.
• 6 to 8 years of experience in functional testing, including at least 2 years leading testing of business-critical modules.
• Experience in complex financial applications, clearing and settlement, payment systems, capital markets, custody or core banking. Depository experience is a strong advantage, not a requirement.
• Highly detail-oriented, with excellent analytical and logical reasoning skills.
• Assertive, clear communicator who can raise risks and dependencies with confidence.
• Certifications such as ISTQB or NISM capital market modules are good to have.