Manuel Baute Open to new projects

Senior QA Specialist · Quality Enablement
Remote from Buenos Aires, working US hours

Manuel
Baute

I catch the defects before your customers do.

Test strategy, UAT and incident workflows for fintech and contact center platforms, built so every team can own quality, not just QA.

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regression · release candidate
  1. ✓Refinance payment posts once, not twice1.2s
  2. ✓Spanish caller routes to the ES voice queue0.8s
  3. !Chatbot answer contradicts the refund articledefect
  4. ↳Logged, fixed, retested before release
  5. ✓Rollback plan verified in staging2.4s
  6. ✓Opt-out request removes the number within SLA1.6s
  7. ✓Agent never receives two calls at once1.1s
1,184passed
401defects caught
0found by customers

Quality is a product, not a service.

A service waits at the end of the line to approve or reject. A product gets designed, adopted and improved.

So I join at kickoff and ask the hard questions early: what test environment we have, what success looks like, how we roll back. Then I leave behind runbooks and guides that Product and Engineering use on their own.

400+defects caught before a global CRM migration
~2,500/mocompliance requests automated with Python
Weeks → hoursproduction incident time-to-detect
1,500+test cases tiered by a risk-based model

What I design, test and keep running.

Test strategy and UAT

End-to-end system journey test plans and UAT coordinated across global sites and time zones.

E2E · UAT · smoke · smart regression

Shift-left quality

Acceptance criteria, test environments, rollback and kill-switch plans and controlled rollouts, settled before the first line of code.

risk-based testing · traceability

Incident management and RCA

Rollback-first P1 handling, alerting built from what the retros find, and priority-based SLAs on every corrective action, with Jira reminders at 21 days, 7 days and the due date so engineers can plan them into sprints.

Rootly · Jira · Slack

AI and chatbot QA

Checking support chatbots against the knowledge articles, holding scope guardrails, catching hallucinations and matching tone to the contact reason.

LLM validation · conversational QA

Process automation

Intake pipelines and scripts that replace manual work, from production-support triage to compliance requests.

Python · Claude Code · Asana

Production support and triage

One intake pipeline for every report from the field: triaged, fixed in-house or routed to Engineering with the context already gathered, and fed back to Product.

Asana · Jira · Xray

Selected work

Caribou Financial

US auto refinance fintech, 150k+ customers. 2025 to present.

I built the shift-left quality function from scratch, turned a run of daily untracked incidents into a repeatable workflow in Rootly, and automated compliance work that used to be done by hand.

Weeks → hrstime-to-detect (MTTD)
~2,500DNC and PII requests automated monthly
~300support reports a month in one pipeline

Every critical initiative now starts with test environments, success criteria and a rollback plan on the table. Escaped bugs and rollbacks on those initiatives have dropped.

Airbnb

Global contact center platform. 2021 to 2025.

I owned test strategy and UAT for the migration to a new CRM and routing infrastructure, and helped define the routing source of truth: which team gets each call, chat, message or email.

400+defects caught before release
7global sites in test execution
+20%coverage as the first QA analyst

Try it: route an interaction

Channel
Language
Contact reason
EN Safety team, voice priority 1 · skips the general queue agent concurrency: 1 call at a time

A simplified illustration of how routing rules work, not Airbnb’s real configuration.

Experience

  1. Senior Quality Enablement Specialist

    Caribou Financial, via Hip Hip QA

    Shift-left quality on critical initiatives, the incident workflow in Rootly, risk-based testing, and runbooks that let Product and Engineering own quality.

  2. Senior QA Specialist, Test Strategy & UAT

    Airbnb, via Sutherland Global Services

    1. QA Analyst, 2021
    2. Senior QA Analyst, 2022
    3. Senior QA Specialist, 2023

    First QA analyst in the program. Owned UAT for the CRM and routing migration and validated AI chatbots for customer support.

  3. Customer and Technical Support

    Airbnb and Apple

    Product expert on complex cases and the link to Software Development. Knowing the systems from the inside is what brought me into QA.

Full experience in my résumé (PDF)

About

I don’t just test software. I question how it works, challenge how it’s built, and look for ways to make it better.

I came into QA from the contact center floor. I know where the edge cases hide because I used to be the person who ran into them. When something breaks, reporting it is only the start. I want to understand the flow, find the root cause, see who it affects downstream, and make sure it doesn’t come back.

I connect Engineering, Product and Operations, and turn messy problems into something each team can act on. Lately I’ve been exploring AI-assisted development with Claude Code and test automation with Playwright.

I’m Venezuelan, based in Buenos Aires, and I work in English and Spanish every day.

testing
Functional, end-to-end, UAT, smoke, smart regression, integration, API basics (Postman), load test coordination, AI and chatbot validation
automation
Python, AI-assisted development with Claude Code, Git and GitHub, Asana automations
test management
Jira, Xray, defect triage, risk-based prioritization
incidents
Rootly, Jira workflows and SLAs, alerting design, retros, production support
cx platforms
Omnichannel routing, Five9, Genesys PureCloud, NICE, Nexidia, Salesforce
collaboration
Confluence, Asana, Slack, Figma, Lucidchart
education
B.A. Modern Languages, Business concentration, Universidad Arturo Michelena
languages
Spanish (native), English (C1)

Beyond the screen

Aragua, Venezuela

Tenor

I sang tenor in the Aragua State Symphonic Choir. Rehearsing a hundred voices into one taught me a lot about listening, timing and getting the details right.

Dojo

Shotokan karate

I train Shotokan karate. Same lesson as good testing: repeat the fundamentals until they hold up under pressure.

Four countries

Home, in a few accents

Venezuelan by birth, married to a bogotana, and now in Buenos Aires for the tango, the theater and the people.

VenezuelaPanama, 1 yrColombia, 10 yrsBuenos Aires

Head of security and QA

África and Mera

A Frenchie and a Yorkie who review every release from my lap and approve nothing without treats.

Have a release coming up?

hello@manuelbaute.dev

LinkedIn Download résumé (PDF)