Javier AquinoQA Lead & SDET

About me

I'm QA Lead at Banco Popular Dominicano, the largest private bank in the Dominican Republic. I lead QA for TOKE, the first Zelle/Bizum-style instant payment platform launched in the country, and since late October 2026 I also directly own the automation role. Today I lead two manual QA engineers.

I have three years in high-impact banking systems. I started in December 2023 as a consultant on the core banking migration to Temenos; in April 2025 the bank hired me directly as Backend QA Engineer and later promoted me to QA Lead.

I work on API and service automation with Karate and Playwright, manual testing of native Android and iOS apps, performance testing with K6 and JMeter, and automated test execution in Jenkins pipelines.

Location

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Availability

Remote, on UTC-4 with a full workday of overlap with U.S. Eastern time.

Languages

Spanish (native), English (B2–C1)

Projects

5 personal practice projects I'm building.

• In progress

  API test suite with Karate

  Read, create and negative cases against a public API, with isolated test data and an HTML results report.

  • Karate
  • Java
  • Maven

• In progress

  E2E suite with Playwright and Gherkin

  Login, cart and checkout flows on a practice site, with Gherkin scenarios and the Page Object Model.

  • Playwright
  • BDD (Gherkin)
  • TypeScript

• In progress

  Mobile automation with Appium

  Key flows of a practice Android app automated with Appium and WebDriverIO, with Gherkin scenarios.

  • Appium
  • WebDriverIO
  • BDD (Gherkin)

• In progress

  Load tests with K6

  Load scenarios with 95th-percentile and error-rate thresholds, run in CI.

  • K6
  • JavaScript
  • Jenkins

• In progress

  Test environment with Docker Compose and Jenkins

  Services and test suite brought up with a single command, and the same flow run in a Jenkins pipeline.

  • Docker
  • Docker Compose
  • Jenkins

Experience

1. Apr 2025 – Present

   QA Lead

   Banco Popular Dominicano, Santo Domingo

   Largest private bank in the Dominican Republic. Continuous engagement since December 2023: first as a contractor, hired directly in April 2025 as Backend QA Engineer and promoted to QA Lead.

   • Lead the QA team on TOKE, the first Zelle/Bizum-style instant payment platform launched in the country, currently with two manual QA engineers reporting to me. I own test strategy, coverage planning, defect triage and release readiness sign-off.
   • Own release quality through the platform's launch and rapid early adoption at national scale, sustaining a low rate of production incidents across frequent releases under aggressive delivery timelines.
   • Own manual front-end QA for the native Android and iOS applications: functional, regression and exploratory testing across devices, OS versions and app store release candidates.
   • Since late October 2026, I directly own the team's automation role: I design and maintain API and service suites with Karate, executed on every build by Jenkins pipelines, and drive the rollout of Playwright to extend automated coverage to end-to-end flows.
   • Enforce pre-release regression gates across backend services and app store submissions, so the large majority of defects are resolved in the QA cycle and never reach production.
   • Take part in the team's adoption of AI-assisted tooling for pull request review and sprint ticket analysis, improving ticket quality before work reaches QA.
   • Run performance and load tests with K6 and JMeter, identifying bottlenecks under peak transaction volumes and giving scalability recommendations to engineering leadership.
   • Validate data integrity across services with SQL queries against banking databases and track defects in Jira in an Agile/Scrum environment.

2. Dec 2023 – Apr 2025

   Software Analyst and QA Engineer

   CGL / NEORIS, Santo Domingo

   Contractor on-site at Banco Popular Dominicano. Global digital consulting firm.

   • Core QA contributor on Banco Popular's migration of its core banking system to the Temenos platform, one of the largest technology transformation programs in Dominican banking: I validated migrated services, data integrity and business continuity across legacy and Temenos environments.
   • Authored and maintained QA documentation across about 20 banking projects running in parallel: test plans, test cases, execution evidence and traceability matrices, the written baseline that auditors and delivery leads relied on.
   • Designed, executed and documented functional and regression test suites, keeping full traceability from requirement to defect closure in every test phase.
   • Coordinated and led test execution cycles, reporting defect metrics and release readiness to bank stakeholders and project leadership.
   • Improved documentation and traceability standards, which raised audit readiness and cut repeated test-design effort across releases.
   • Found defects earlier through structured, risk-based QA processes, and validated compliance with quality and regulatory standards in high-impact financial applications.
   • Sustained performance during the engagement led Banco Popular to hire me directly in April 2025, with no interruption on the same systems.

Skills

Education

Contact

I'm open to opportunities as a QA Lead or SDET.

JavierAquinoV1@gmail.com

• LinkedIn
• GitHub