Branch International

Title: Quality Platform Lead Location: India Job Description: Full Time Experienced Branch Overview Branch is a leading AI-powered lending fintech with 50M+ downloads across India and Africa. We use alternative data and machine learning to expand financial access for millions of people traditionally excluded from the formal financial system. Founded by the former CEO of Kiva.org and backed by leading investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Visa, and the IFC, Branch combines mission-driven impact with world-class technology and scale. In India, Branch operates as a regulated digital lending institution and Middle Layer NBFC, building trusted and accessible financial products for millions of customers across the country. Our 250+ member India team is growing rapidly and works across technology, data science, risk, product, and operations to solve high-impact problems at scale. Certified as a Great Place to Work in 2025, Branch offers the opportunity to build meaningful careers while shaping the future of inclusive fintech in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies. About Role: At Branch, quality has always been the responsibility of the engineers, product managers, and business owners who build and ship the product. We deliberately do not have a traditional QA team gating releases — we believe the accountability for what goes to production must sit with the people building it, not with a separate function checking their work. As the Quality Platform Lead, you will build and lead a small, high-leverage team that audits production against our stated expectations — functional, behavioral, regulatory, and experiential — and reports honestly on what they find. You will not own release gates. You will not sign off on builds. Engineers and Product retain full ownership of what they ship and when. Your team's mandate is to be the independent, automation-first lens on whether what's running in production actually matches what we said we were building, and to make any drift visible to the people who can fix it. You will architect and champion a continuous, automated quality-auditing ecosystem. Instead of acting as a release gatekeeper, this leader will build smart automation and AI-driven agents to continuously evaluate production against company standards, providing the high-fidelity feedback loops our engineering, product, and business teams need to maintain ultimate accountability. This is a builder role. You will define the operating model from scratch, hire a small team of strong engineers, and lean heavily on automation, agents, and continuous production verification rather than manual test cycles. Success looks like a team that catches more, manually does less, and grows the organization's confidence in its own output without becoming a bottleneck to it. Responsibilities - Establish charter, operating principles, success metrics, and the team itself. Reinforce in every process that this is an audit function, not a release gate. - Design and operate an automation-first stack: AI agents, synthetic monitoring, production probes, behavioral diffing, and continuous sampling. - Design and execute a continuous non-intrusive production auditing strategy to catch subpar experiences, regressions, and drift. Establish measurable metrics across user experience and system behavior. Continuous automated coverage that scales with the product instead of a pile of manual test cases. - Translate audit findings into actionable insights for Engineering and Product. Partner on root-causing systemic issues without taking ownership of their bug fixes, and build dashboards that give the organization real-time visibility into production quality. - Recruit, grow, and empower a team of strong builders first and quality specialists second. Hold a high bar on technical depth. - Be a credible technical voice on incidents, regressions, and quality patterns. Stay hands-on enough to contribute to the team's stack. - Own your team's full delivery cycle and engineering standards: code review, testing discipline, observability, and responsible AI use. - Represent the team's findings through clear written reports, metrics, and well-run forums. Resist pressure to convert audit findings into release blocks. Qualifications - 8+ years building production software, with at least 2 years leading engineers directly. Some of that experience in environments where you owned quality, reliability, or production verification at scale. - Track record of building automation-first quality or verification systems — test infrastructure, synthetic monitoring, production probing, chaos or behavioral testing rather than managing manual QA. - Hands-on experience with LLMs, AI agents, or sophisticated testing tools to automate non-deterministic flows, and a sharp view on where modern AI changes the economics of test and audit work. - Deep familiarity with modern automation frameworks (Playwright, Cypress), CI/CD, and observability tools (Datadog, New Relic). You think in terms of sampling, blast radius, and error budgets rather than green/red test suites. - Strong foundation in backend or full-stack systems, distributed systems, and data modeling. Mobile or AI systems experience a plus. - Strong conviction in an engineering-owned quality model and a resistance to letting a quality function become a scapegoat for bugs. - Experience hiring engineers and calibrating a team's bar, including hard calls on performance. - Exceptional, highly structured communication skills, with the ability to influence teams using data and operate effectively across asynchronous environments. - Background working in fast-paced, high-scale environments; experience in fintech, payments, lending, AI, or mobile is a strong plus. Benefits of Joining - Competitive salary and equity package - Fast-paced, collaborative, and high-autonomy work culture - Hybrid work setup designed for flexibility and work-life balance - Fully paid group medical insurance and personal accident insurance - Generous paid time off, plus company-declared public holidays - Fully paid parental leave for fathers and non-birthing parents (12 weeks), in addition to 26 weeks of statutory maternity leave - Monthly WFH stipend, along with a one-time home office setup budget - $500 annual professional development budget - Quarterly social meet-ups and sponsored monthly team lunches We’re looking for more than just qualifications -- if you’re unsure that you meet the criteria but identify with our vision of providing equal opportunity to everyone to access financial services, please do not hesitate to apply! Branch International is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The company does not and will not discriminate in employment on any basis prohibited by applicable law.

• Participate and assist in the lifecycle of development for key areas of the Branch product • Work closely with our engineering and operational teams to triage bugs, define requirements, and set high-level quarterly milestones • Evaluate, initiate, and manage partnerships with third-party vendors to help Branch achieve our product roadmap • Draw insights from user research, experiments, and industry trends to set the team strategy and prioritize projects

• Define and build Branch's motion design language as a layer on our Material Design based design system • Set the principles, patterns, and standards for how motion behaves across the Android and Web • Proactively spot opportunities across the app where motion can elevate the experience • Collaborate closely with product designers, engineers, and PMs to identify and add motion design to solve real UX problems • Translate product goals and user needs into motion concepts • Design purposeful micro-interactions, transitions, and animations that simplify user flows for onboarding KYC, loan application, and payments • Deliver production-ready motion assets (Lottie, GIFs, specs, prototypes) for engineering handoff • Own motion quality end-to-end, from concept to implementation review • Stay current with motion trends, tooling, and best practices

Branch Overview Branch is a leading AI-based lending fintech with 50M+ downloads across India and Africa. We use alternative data to reach millions of people that are largely excluded from the financial sector. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with operations in India, Nigeria and Kenya, Branch is a for-profit, socially conscious company built for scale and impact. Our mission-driven team—founded and led by the former CEO of Kiva.org—now spans 400+ employees globally. We’re backed by investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Visa, and the IFC. Job Overview We are seeking a hands-on Cloud Security Engineer to help secure the infrastructure and platforms that power our global Fin-Tech systems. In this role, you will work at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, security engineering, and DevSecOps to identify attack surfaces, strengthen security guardrails, and embed security directly into our engineering workflows. You will focus on securing our AWS environments, container platforms, and deployment pipelines while helping engineers design systems that are resilient to real-world threats. You will collaborate closely with platform engineers, DevOps teams, and application developers to proactively identify risks, automate security controls, and improve the overall security posture of our systems. This role requires someone who can think like an attacker but build like an engineer. You are someone who enjoys identifying weaknesses, designing preventative controls, and building security automation that scales with the platform. You will work closely with our engineering teams across India, the United States, Nigeria, and Kenya, collaborating across time zones to help build and secure a world-class Fin-Tech platform serving millions of users globally. As a company, we are passionate about our customers, fearless in the face of barriers, and driven by data. As an engineering team, we value bottom-up innovation and decentralized decision-making. We believe the best ideas can come from anyone in the company. We work hard to create an environment where everyone feels empowered to propose solutions, challenge assumptions, and drive meaningful impact. We are looking for individuals who thrive in a fast-moving, innovative, and customer-focused setting and want to contribute to building scalable, reliable, and efficient backend systems. Responsibilities - Identify and secure attack surfaces across our AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, and internal platforms by proactively assessing misconfigurations, access risks, and exposed services. - Design and implement preventative cloud security guardrails including IAM hardening, network controls, secrets management, and infrastructure security best practices. - Conduct security design reviews for new services and infrastructure changes to identify architectural risks before systems reach production. - Build and integrate security checks directly into CI/CD pipelines to enforce automated scanning for vulnerabilities, container images, infrastructure configurations, and application dependencies. - Develop automation and internal tooling to detect, prevent, and remediate security issues such as leaked secrets, excessive permissions, insecure configurations, and vulnerable dependencies. - Perform threat modeling and adversarial analysis of infrastructure and application systems to identify realistic attack paths and improve system defenses. - Improve visibility into the security posture of our systems through monitoring, logging, and security signal generation across cloud infrastructure and workloads. - Investigate security incidents and vulnerabilities, perform root cause analysis, and implement long-term fixes to prevent recurrence. - Collaborate closely with platform, infrastructure, and application engineering teams to ensure security is embedded in development workflows and infrastructure design. - Contribute to building scalable security practices including vulnerability management processes, security automation frameworks, and infrastructure security standards. Qualifications - 4–8 years of experience in cloud security, DevSecOps, security engineering, or related roles involving infrastructure and application security. - Strong understanding of applied cryptography and ability to choose the right security tools, techniques, and approach for securing systems from a variety of threats. - Strong hands-on experience securing AWS environments including IAM policies, networking controls, access management, logging, and infrastructure hardening. - Practical experience working with Kubernetes and containerized environments, including securing container images, workloads, and cluster configurations. - Experience integrating security controls into CI/CD pipelines and development workflows, including automated vulnerability scanning and dependency security checks. - Ability to write automation and security tooling using scripting or programming languages such as Python, Go, or similar. - Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code tools such as Terraform and an understanding of securing infrastructure configurations and deployment pipelines. - Experience identifying and remediating cloud security risks such as excessive IAM permissions, exposed services, insecure secrets management, and vulnerable infrastructure components. - Understanding of common cloud and application security threats including privilege escalation, credential leakage, network exposure, and supply chain vulnerabilities. - Strong problem-solving mindset with the ability to think adversarially about systems and proactively identify potential attack paths. - Excellent collaboration and communication skills (verbal as well as written) with the ability to work closely with engineering teams and other stakeholders to improve security posture without slowing development velocity. - Bonus experience includes security research, penetration testing, bug bounty participation, building internal security tooling, or contributions to security-focused open-source projects. - Bonus abilities include ability to lead and mentor a team, and ability to drive complex projects spanning code bases, systems, and people. Benefits of Joining - Be part of a mission-driven, fast-paced, and entrepreneurial environment that fosters innovation and impact. - Receive a competitive salary and equity package, reflecting your value and contributions. - Thrive in a collaborative and flat company culture that encourages open communication and idea-sharing. - Enjoy the flexibility of a remote-first work setup, with opportunities for occasional in-person collaboration. - Benefit from fully-paid Health Insurance to support your well-being. - Work-life balance is not a myth. Take advantage of paid time off, including personal leave, bereavement leave, and sick leave. - Access fully paid parental leave, with 6 months of maternity leave and 3 months of paternity leave. - Leverage annual professional development budget to upskill and advance your career. - Enjoy team meals and social events, both virtual and in-person, to connect and bond with colleagues. We’re looking for more than just qualifications – if you’re unsure that you meet the criteria but identify with our vision of providing equal opportunity to everyone to access financial services, please do not hesitate to apply! Branch International is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The company does not and will not discriminate in employment on any basis prohibited by applicable law.

• Contributing to the design and development of our Android app (written in a mix of Java and Kotlin). • Architect and lead the modularization of our production Android app, delivering reusable feature modules and SDKs that scale for billions of users. • Scoping new projects and features with our product team, and implementing them (including contributing to some parts of our backend systems when needed). • Define and enforce a mobile security strategy, including biometrics integration, cryptography, secure networking, and obfuscation to protect sensitive financial data. • Managing multiple projects simultaneously. • Contributing to the overall engineering roadmap, including building out new products for the Indian market and beyond. • Establish comprehensive observability: Monitoring crash rates, network performance, and UI latency to ensure a premium user experience. • Drive the adoption of modern Android standards. • Mentoring and teaching other team members.

• Own design end-to-end: Lead projects autonomously from PRD to engineer handoff — user flows, wireframes, hi-fi mockups, prototypes, usability testing, and design QA • Design for acquisition, activation, and retention: Own onboarding, monetization, and referral experiences that help users understand Branch's value quickly and turn them into advocates • Experiment rapidly with data-informed iteration: Work in quick cycles — test hypotheses, ship experiments, define KPIs, and iterate based on A/B results, funnel analysis, and user behavior patterns • Deeply understand our customers: Collaborate with UX Researchers on foundational and formative research • Partner cross-functionally: Work with Product Managers, Engineers, User Researchers, and Marketers to drive growth initiatives from concept to launch • Communicate clearly across globally distributed teams • Leverage AI to accelerate your work: Use AI tools fluently — for ideation, prototyping, content generation, and building functional demos • Strengthen our design system: Contribute to our design system's evolution — ensuring consistency and scalability across products and markets

• Design and conduct generative (discovery) and evaluative (usability) research using a variety of methods, including 1:1 interviews, surveys, usability testing, card sorting, and diary studies. • Validate concepts and prototypes early and often to reduce risk and ensure usability • Conduct competitor research to benchmark our products and services against the market to recommend improvements • Champion a user-centric culture by advocating for research insights across the organization, specifically bridging the gap between our India-based teams and the global product organization • Foster strong cross-functional relationships, ensuring that research learnings are cascaded through different teams effectively to make it impactful and actionable

• Design, build, and maintain customer-facing and internal products and APIs, following best practices around security, performance, reliability, and maintainability. • Contribute to technical and product decisions by providing thoughtful input, raising trade-offs, and helping execute on agreed-upon solutions. • Collaborate with engineers across functional areas (Android, Machine Learning, Data, DevOps, etc.) to support shared systems and identify opportunities for improvement. • Participate in on-call rotations and operational work, helping diagnose issues, improve system reliability, and reduce future incidents. • Continuously improve existing systems, by refactoring code, reducing technical debt, and improving developer productivity.