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~/samuel
Available·Jakarta — — WIB

I'm a Software QA Team Lead working remotely at Jakarta for a Berlin startup. Born in Jakarta, raised in Semarang from junior high, studied in Malaysia, tested payments at Shopee. This is the journey so far.

RoleSoftware QA Team Lead
Paul's Job·Remote · Berlin HQ
The Journey
IDMYDE
Jakarta → Semarang → Sepang → JakartaBerlin
Explore the journey

The Journey

Six chapters across three countries.

Jakarta-born, raised in Semarang from junior high, studied in Sepang, then back to Jakarta — with Berlin now on the org chart. Each stop taught me something different about building software that actually works in production.

  1. Education
    Sep 2018 — Sep 2022
    4y

    B.Eng. Software Engineering (Honours)

    Xiamen University Malaysia·Sepang, Malaysia

    Foundation — where the engineering instinct was forged.

    Four years of computer science rigor on a 50% merit scholarship I maintained throughout. Graduated with a 3.35 CGPA and a thesis good enough for Springer.

    • 50% Merit Scholarship — maintained all four years
    • CGPA: 3.35
    • Thesis GPA: 4.0
    • Built a 2D shooter with AI-driven enemies as a team capstone
    Projects (2)

    Undergraduate Thesis

    Sep 2021 – Jan 2022

    Differential Fault Attacks on Lightweight Authenticated Encryption Stream Cipher TinyJAMBU. Published April 2025 by Springer Nature Switzerland in Information Security in a Connected World.

    Game Design & Development

    Sep 2020 – Jan 2021

    Designed and built a 2D shooter with five progressive levels, a storyline, and AI enemies with distinct attack patterns.

    C++C#PythonCryptographyUnityAI
  2. Internship
    Mar 2022 — Jul 2022
    4 mo

    Software Development Engineer in Test — Intern

    BliBli.com·Jakarta, Indonesia·Onsite

    First taste of production — and the discipline of automation.

    Five months inside one of Indonesia's largest e-commerce platforms. Learned that shipping fast means testing faster, and wrote my first real automation framework.

    • Built an internal automated UI testing framework from scratch
    • Designed and executed test cases directly from product requirements
    • Translated manual test cases into repeatable Selenium + Cucumber BDD suites
    Projects (1)

    Internal Website UI Automation

    Mar – Jul 2022

    Developed an internal automated UI testing framework used by the team to regression-test their admin tooling.

    JavaSeleniumCucumber BDDJiraSlackMS Teams
  3. Engineer
    Aug 2022 — Oct 2023
    1y 2mo

    Software QA Engineer — Full Time

    Shopee·Jakarta, Indonesia·Onsite

    ShopeePay: where every bug is a payment that didn't go through.

    Fourteen months on Shopee Indonesia's Payment Processing Team inside Sea Labs. Backend, APIs, databases — the machinery behind millions of real transactions every day. Three major projects integrating with banks, accounting, and Shopee's own cloud.

    • Backend + API testing for the ShopeePay payment module
    • Led QA for a Java → Golang rewrite of the callback service (faster response, tighter logic)
    • Coordinated with ShopeePay ID, Payment Module, and Bank teams — 4-party integration
    • Shipped real-time accounting integration and a full GCP → SPACE cloud migration
    Projects (3)

    Callback Service Rewrite

    Apr – Jun 2023

    Rewrote payment callbacks from Java to Golang with improved logic. Four-party integration: User, ShopeePay ID, Payment Module, and Banks.

    Accounting Integration

    Jan – Mar 2023

    Real-time payment data pipeline so the Accounting team could reconcile based on live user payment events.

    GCP → SPACE Migration

    Sep – Oct 2022

    Migrated ShopeePay services and data from GCP to Shopee's in-house cloud platform for cost efficiency.

    GoPythonJavaMySQLRedisJenkinsJiraMattermostmacOS Terminal
  4. Engineer
    Mar 2023 — Oct 2023
    7 mo

    Freelance QA

    Paul's Job·Frankfurt / Remote·Remote

    Moonlighting across time zones — a Frankfurt startup needed QA.

    Overlapped with my Shopee role. A relationship-management startup out of Frankfurt needed someone to steady the ship during a product revamp. I took them on evenings and weekends, helped them ship confidently, and earned a full-time offer out of it.

    • Brought structured QA into a fast-moving startup
    • Authored the automation foundation that scaled into the full-time role
    SeleniumCucumber BDDJavaPostmanJira
  5. Engineer
    Nov 2023 — Aug 2024
    9 mo

    Software QA Engineer — Full Time

    Paul's Job·Berlin, Germany·Remote

    Europe, formally. Owning QA for a talent platform getting rebuilt from the ground up.

    Converted from freelance to full-time. Drove daily test execution across the SDLC, ran regression on legacy and in-development products, and stood up a proper Selenium + Cucumber automation framework with Serenity reporting. Integrated ChatGPT for message automation and Twilio for comms — the kind of 'test the whole product' work I love.

    • Daily test-case authoring and execution throughout the SDLC
    • Built UI regression automation with Selenium + Cucumber BDD + Serenity
    • QA'd ChatGPT + Twilio integration for automated messaging
    • Github Actions + Cron jobs for scheduled test runs
    Projects (2)

    Company Product Revamp

    Mar 2023 – ongoing

    New platform for talent communities, channels, and job promotions — rebuilt on top of the legacy business model with new flows and a smoother UX.

    Legacy Product Regression

    Mar – May 2023

    Regression on the legacy product to guarantee business-critical flows held up during the revamp. Bug reporting was the critical path.

    SeleniumCucumber BDDJavaSerenityPostmanPostgreSQLDBeaverGithub ActionsTwilioChatGPT APICron
  6. Lead
    Aug 2024 — Present
    1y 8mo

    Software QA Team Lead

    Paul's Job·Berlin, Germany·Remote

    Leading quality into the AI-agent era — automation, metrics, and Hydra shipping alongside us.

    Promoted to Team Lead. Responsible for automation strategy across multiple products, quality metrics that actually drive decisions, and keeping developers, PMs, and QA engineers rowing in the same direction. Proposed Hydra — a Jira-driven QA agent on Claude and Codex — and led the QA team building it as our move to meet the AI-agent era head-on. Now live on staging and still actively evolving. Frees the team to spend their hours on test strategy and edge-case thinking instead of manual regression.

    • Rolled out automated testing frameworks across multiple products
    • Own quality metrics — surfacing data that product and engineering act on
    • Coordinate cross-functional delivery between dev, product, and QA
    • Mentoring and scaling the QA practice as the product grows
    • Initiated Hydra and led the team building it — a Jira-driven QA agent now live on staging, validating tickets across backend, frontend, and hybrid flows
    • Codified the team's QA discipline as reusable agent skills: systematic debugging, TDD, verification-before-completion, parallel dispatch
    Projects (2)

    Hydra — QA Validation Agent

    Live · 2026 – ongoing

    A Jira-driven QA agent I designed and the QA team I lead built. Takes a ticket key and routes it through the right validation head — backend API verification, frontend UI verification, or a hybrid flow. Captures discovery notes, Postman collections, and test reports, then publishes the evidence bundle to cloud storage for reviewers. Live on staging, still actively growing new heads.

    Read the full Hydra case study

    QA Skill System

    2026 – ongoing

    The playbook Hydra runs on — a library of composable agent skills built on Claude Code that encode our QA engineering practices: brainstorming, writing & executing plans, systematic debugging, test-driven development, requesting code review, parallel agent dispatch. Symlinked across Claude Code and Cursor so the whole team works from the same source of truth.

    StrategyMentoringClaudeCodexClaude CodeCursorAI AgentsMCPContext7PythonuvJira APIPostmanGCSSeleniumCucumberSerenityCI/CDMetrics & Reporting

Published Research

Breaking a cipher, landing a Springer publication.

My undergraduate thesis — a differential fault analysis on the TinyJAMBU lightweight authenticated encryption stream cipher — was accepted into Springer Nature's Information Security in a Connected World. Published April 2025.

Publication · April 2025

Cryptographic analysis work exploring how differential fault injection can break TinyJAMBU — a NIST lightweight-cryptography finalist. The thesis earned a 4.0 GPA at Xiamen University Malaysia and was later accepted into Springer Nature's peer-reviewed collection on information security.

Published in
Information Security in a Connected World
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
Thesis GPA
4.0 / 4.0
Read on Springer
· PUBLISHED · APRIL 2025 · SPRINGER NATURE · PEER REVIEWED · PUBLISHED · APRIL 2025 · SPRINGER NATURE · PEER REVIEWED · PUBLISHED · APRIL 2025 · SPRINGER NATURE · PEER REVIEWED
Scholarship
50% Merit
Maintained 4 years
CGPA
3.35 / 4.0
B.Eng. Hons · Xiamen University Malaysia

Toolbox

What I actually use, shipping every week.

The tools behind three years of production QA work — from payment systems to talent platforms.

Programming Languages
  • Python
  • Java
  • SQL
  • Golang
  • C++
  • C#
Spoken Languages
  • English
  • Bahasa Indonesia
  • Mandarin
QA Stack
SeleniumCucumber BDDSerenity ReportPostmanAPI TestingRegression TestingBackend TestingTest Case Design
Tools & Infrastructure
JiraGitHubGitHub ActionsJenkinsCronDBeaverPostgreSQLMySQLRedisTwilioSlackMattermost
How I show up
Strong Analytical Skills.
Adaptive.
Persistent Learner.

What's next

Let's build something that doesn't break.

Open to conversations about QA leadership, automation strategy, or anything that takes quality seriously. Jakarta-based, Berlin-connected, remote-friendly — responds within 24 hours.