Principal Test Automation Architect

Acorn Group; Liverpool; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working options

Mental health support

Career development

Flexible benefits

Recognition awards

Job summary

Acorn Group, based in Liverpool, is seeking a Principal Test Automation Engineer to lead the design and delivery of a containerised, shared testing framework. You will set CI/CD test strategies, introduce contract testing, and drive standardisation across squads in a hands-on role.

The position requires strong TS/Playwright skills, C#/.NET proficiency, and experience with Docker-based environments. Hybrid work enabled in Liverpool City Centre HQ.

Qualifications

• Senior or Principal-level role in test automation or quality engineering, leading framework development.
• Strong TypeScript and Playwright skills; mobile tooling is a plus.
• Proficiency in C# and .NET, writing component and integration tests against microservices.
• Experience with Docker-based test environments and per-test isolated infrastructure.
• Experience with service virtualization and HTTP stubbing (WireMock or similar).
• Contract testing (Pact) across services and message schemas.
• Test data management across UI, API and DB with parallel runs.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a shared test harness and ephemeral per-test infrastructure.
• Define what tests belong in CI vs CD and establish quality gates.
• Establish patterns for component, contract, API, UI, regression and performance testing with reference implementations.
• Own test data seeding and isolation to enable parallel test execution.
• Design quality gates in Azure DevOps pipelines and improve test reliability.
• Collaborate across squads, pair programming, and provide guidance to reduce bottlenecks.
• Lead root cause analysis of production incidents and flaky tests.
• Maintain framework conventions and AI tooling alignment with patterns.

Skills

Playwright

TypeScript

C# / .NET

Test automation

Docker

Testcontainers

Azure DevOps

Pact

WireMock

MassTransit

Pair programming

Code review

Tools

Testcontainers for .NET

WireMock.Net

Maestro

Kubernetes

Azure Service Bus

Job description

Acorn Group, based in Liverpool, is seeking a Principal Test Automation Engineer to lead the design and delivery of a containerised, shared testing framework. You will set CI/CD test strategies, introduce contract testing, and drive standardisation across squads in a hands-on role.

The position requires strong TS/Playwright skills, C#/.NET proficiency, and experience with Docker-based environments. Hybrid work enabled in Liverpool City Centre HQ.