Lead QA Engineer — Automation & Performance for FinTech

Referment; West of England; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

Referment is seeking a hands-on QA/SDET veteran to own test automation for a cloud-native financial services platform. You'll design and implement API and UI automation across React frontend and microservices, integrate tests into CI/CD, and help shape acceptance criteria and BDD scenarios.

You will mentor engineers, review PRs with a quality lens, drive performance/load testing with Gatling/JMeter, and ensure security and data privacy in testing aligned with PCI and ISO 27001 standards.

Qualifications

• Significant commercial experience as a QA, test automation or SDET engineer.
• Strong programming skills for test automation in Kotlin, Java or TypeScript.
• Hands-on API and UI automation using Cypress or Playwright.
• Experience testing Spring Boot microservices, with JUnit and Testcontainers.
• Proven performance and load testing with Gatling, k6 or JMeter.
• CI/CD integration and testing applications on Docker, Kubernetes and AWS.
• Good SQL skills, ideally PostgreSQL.
• Confidence using AI-assisted tools day to day in testing.
• Solid understanding of the test pyramid, BDD and TDD, and Agile/Lean practices.
• Excellent communication, able to explain risk and quality trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Own the team's test automation frameworks and tooling, keeping tests fast, stable and maintainable.
• Lead performance, load and scalability testing, defining realistic scenarios and resolving bottlenecks.
• Review pull requests with a quality lens and evolve the team's test strategy.
• Coach and mentor engineers to own quality, participate in Agile ceremonies.
• Consider security and data privacy in all testing, aligning with PCI/ISO 27001.
• Support releases and triage customer-reported issues with support colleagues.
• Carry out targeted exploratory testing of high-risk changes.

Skills

Automation frameworks

Programming: Kotlin/Java/TS

API/UI automation

CI/CD integration

SQL/PostgreSQL

AI in testing

Test pyramid/BDD/TDD

Communication

Tools

Cypress

Playwright

JUnit

Testcontainers

Gatling

k6

JMeter

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

PostgreSQL

Job description

Referment is seeking a hands-on QA/SDET veteran to own test automation for a cloud-native financial services platform. You'll design and implement API and UI automation across React frontend and microservices, integrate tests into CI/CD, and help shape acceptance criteria and BDD scenarios.

You will mentor engineers, review PRs with a quality lens, drive performance/load testing with Gatling/JMeter, and ensure security and data privacy in testing aligned with PCI and ISO 27001 standards.