QA Engineer: Shift-Left Champion & Automation (Hybrid)

Huxley; Greater London, Glasgow; Hybrid; GBP 45,000 - 55,000; Full time

Job summary

SThree is seeking a QA Engineer in London or Glasgow with hybrid working. The role is permanent, with 5–8 years of experience and a salary between £45,000 and £55,000 depending on skills and experience.

You will join a cross-functional squad to build quality into the product from the outset, combining hands-on test design and automation with quality advocacy. You will manage automated checks, contribute to CI/CD, and ensure end-to-end quality including non-functional testing.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience as a QA/Test Engineer within an agile, product-focused environment.
• Hands-on test automation across API and UI/E2E layers (Selenium/Cypress/Playwright/RestAssured or similar).
• Strong grounding in test design techniques and risk-based prioritisation (e.g. RICE/MoSCoW).
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines as quality gates.
• Working knowledge of contract testing and API assurance (Pact, Postman) independent of the UI.
• Familiarity with non-functional testing: performance, load, resilience, security and accessibility.
• Defect management and test tooling experience (JIRA, Zephyr/Xray, TestRail).
• Understanding of test data and environment management, including compliant data.
• Ability to read and reason about application code to design effective tests and collaborate with engineers.
• Strong communication skills; translate quality signals into actionable insight.

Responsibilities

• Own test approach for the squad's product area; embed quality across the lifecycle.
• Refine stories and own testing content of the Definition of Done; ensure testable acceptance criteria.
• Apply risk-based prioritisation to focus test effort where defect impact is highest.
• Design, maintain and execute functional, integration and end-to-end tests.
• Perform exploratory and edge-case testing to surface defects.
• Validate cross-browser, cross-device and cross-environment behaviour as relevant.
• Build and maintain automated test suites (unit, API, UI/E2E) and integrate into CI/CD as gates.
• Own contract testing for services and validate API behavior independently of UI.
• Coordinate performance, load, resilience, security and accessibility testing as needed.
• Embed quality within a cross-functional squad and coach on testability and data.

Skills

QA Engineer experience

Agile methodologies

Test design

Risk-based testing

Quality advocacy

Education

ISTQB Certification (Foundation)

Relevant degree in technical discipline

Tools

Selenium

Cypress

Playwright

RestAssured

Pact

Postman

JIRA

Zephyr/Xray

TestRail

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

SThree is seeking a QA Engineer in London or Glasgow with hybrid working. The role is permanent, with 5–8 years of experience and a salary between £45,000 and £55,000 depending on skills and experience.

You will join a cross-functional squad to build quality into the product from the outset, combining hands-on test design and automation with quality advocacy. You will manage automated checks, contribute to CI/CD, and ensure end-to-end quality including non-functional testing.