Principal QA Engineer: Backend API Quality Leader

Bauer Media Group; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

28 days holiday + bank holidays

Bauer Academy for internal training

Flexible working

Voluntary time off

Job summary

Bauer Media Group is seeking a Principal QA Engineer to raise the bar for backend quality across our platform. You’ll be the technical authority, embedding testability, resilience and contract integrity into system design and build, partnering with backend engineers, product managers, SRE/DevOps and architects to ensure scalable reliability.

You’ll influence architecture, enable faster feedback and champion AI-assisted automation while maintaining ownership of quality strategy and code

Qualifications

• Proven experience in a highly technical QA Automation or Backend Engineering role in a shift-left environment.
• Deep understanding of RESTful architectures and validating JSON Schemas or GraphQL types at contract level.
• Proficiency in Go or another OO language with ability to ramp up on Go quickly.
• Experience testing asynchronous/event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS) and data resilience patterns.
• Strong Agile/Scrum experience with sprint planning and retrospectives.
• Experience leveraging AI tooling to critique and improve AI-generated code.
• Expertise testing complex APIs, backend architectures and cloud environments (AWS).
• Ability to build, maintain and troubleshoot automated testing within CI/CD with DevOps.
• Team-first mindset with excellent communication and stakeholder management.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural design reviews to embed Testability by Design.
• Drive Contract Driven Testing to evolve services without breaking dependencies.
• Enforce Schema-First development using OpenAPI/Swagger as truth source.
• Design and maintain multi-layered automation focusing on API/service testing and E2E validation with Playwright/TypeScript.
• Mature BDD practices within Agile workflows and mentor engineers.
• Embed automated regression suites and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Own load and performance testing strategies for backend resilience under high traffic.
• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps to integrate observability (logging/tracing/metrics) into quality strategy.
• Leverage AI coding assistants to accelerate boilerplate and test generation while owning architecture.

Skills

QA Automation

Backend Engineering

REST/JSON schemas

Golang

Kafka

AWS

CI/CD

AI tooling

Test strategy

XML/Swagger/OpenAPI

Tools

Playwright

TypeScript

OpenTelemetry

Datadog

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Go

Job description

Bauer Media Group is seeking a Principal QA Engineer to raise the bar for backend quality across our platform. You’ll be the technical authority, embedding testability, resilience and contract integrity into system design and build, partnering with backend engineers, product managers, SRE/DevOps and architects to ensure scalable reliability.

You’ll influence architecture, enable faster feedback and champion AI-assisted automation while maintaining ownership of quality strategy and code