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Maxim Garciu

@maximgarciu

QA Team Lead and Senior SDET focused on CI/CD quality strategy, release readiness, and automation across complex fintech/billing systems.

Moldova

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a QA leadership role where I can own quality strategy, set CI/CD quality gates, and build reliable automation (BDD + API tests) while mentoring teams to ship consistent, production-grade releases in complex fintech systems.

I’m a Senior QA / QA Team Lead with 6+ years of experience building quality strategy, release readiness, and leading QA processes in multi-tenant environments. I bring a practical, production-minded approach—designing processes, setting quality gates, and mentoring teams to deliver consistent releases.

In my most recent roles, I owned test strategy across dev/qa/uat with clear coverage, priorities, and entry/exit criteria, plus effort estimates, risk tracking, and weekly updates to stakeholders. I’ve set up daily Jenkins deployments per environment, built minimal smoke suites, and enforced quality gates before branch promotion—balancing automated coverage with high-value manual testing for exploratory, cross-system integrations, and negative/UX scenarios.

I also build strong automation foundations using BDD (Cucumber/Gherkin), Gherkin features with Java step-definitions, and REST Assured suites (auth, negative cases, JSON Schema checks) integrated into Jenkins as smoke gates. Earlier in my career, I worked on payment transaction lifecycle testing (authorization through clearing/fees/settlement), ISO 20022 (pain.001/pain.002), invoicing, customer portal, and ETL pipelines—using SQL quality controls and Kafka event correlation to validate end-to-end behavior.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Web Developer / QA Engineer

Current

Jun 2025 - Present (1 year 1 month)

Delivered end-to-end web apps and QA for local clients. Built projects using Next.js, CMS, and AI workflows (Claude Code, Gemini) for fast prototyping and code generation. Managed deployment on Vercel and local hosts. Conducted hands-on functional, cross-browser, and mobile QA. Single-handedly ran full delivery cycles from requirements to production deployment and quality sign-off.

Freelance Next.js Vercel Web Testing Python

Senior QA Engineer

Suresoft

Feb 2025 - Jul 2025 (5 months)

Tested mobile (Android/iOS) and web apps with a security focus, covering authentication, permissions, alerts, and offline/latency scenarios. Implemented defect hygiene in Jira and built a Confluence Test Hub to streamline onboarding and daily testing.

Security Testing Authentication Permissions Jira Confluence Defect Triage Root Cause Analysis Test Planning Acceptance Criteria

QA Team Lead (SDET)

Endava

Sep 2023 - Jun 2025 (1 year 9 months)

Owned QA test strategy across dev/qa/uat, including coverage, priorities, entry/exit criteria, and module ownership. Led QA/SDET activities by setting up Jenkins deployments per environment, building smoke suites and automation (Gherkin/Java, REST Assured, JSON Schema checks), and running production releases with readiness and post-release monitoring.

Test Strategy Test Planning CI CD Jenkins Smoke Testing Quality Gates Gherkin Java Rest Assured Negative Testing Testing Automation Mountebank Regression Testing

Senior QA Engineer

Endava

Apr 2017 - Aug 2023 (6 years 4 months)

Tested payment transaction lifecycle scenarios (authorization through clearing/fees to settlement) and ensured correct state transitions, idempotency, and rounding rules. Set up ETL testing and SQL quality controls for reconciliation and data integrity, and performed end-to-end regression using generated inputs with discrepancy reporting.

End To End Testing Payment Testing ETL Testing SQL Data Reconciliation Deduplication Kafka Event Validation Correlation IDs

QA Technician

Endava

Jun 2017 - Mar 2018 (9 months)

Analyzed BRD/FRD and created test requirements, test cases, and scenarios in HP Quality Center. Performed functional, regression, compatibility, and acceptance testing and triaged defects until resolution.

BRD FRD Analysis Test Case Creation Functional Testing Regression Testing Acceptance Testing Defect Triage

QA Intern

Endava

Jan 2017 - Jan 2017 (0 months)

Learned core QA concepts including bug tracking, test cases, and testing levels/types, then wrote and executed functional and regression test cases. Covered basic database concepts and fundamentals of test design.

Test Case Design Test Cases Functional Testing Regression Testing

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

Endava

Internship

2017 -

Activities and societies: Learned testing concepts (bug, test cases, testing types/levels), wrote/executed functional & regression test cases, and covered database basics.

Completed an internship at Endava in 2017, learning basic testing concepts, test design, and database fundamentals.