Senior QA Engineer based in United Kingdom.
Accountabilities
- Embed fully within an engineering squad, participating in sprint planning, daily standups, reviews, retrospectives, and other ceremonies as a core technical contributor.
- Define and refine acceptance criteria with Product Owners, identifying ambiguity and quality risks before implementation begins.
- Own the squad’s test architecture and strategy, determining how unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing work together and identifying coverage gaps.
- Lead performance and load testing, establishing baselines, evaluating throughput and concurrency limits, and translating findings into actionable engineering improvements.
- Own the squad’s Definition of Done and quality gates, serving as a final internal quality check before releases progress to staging or production.
- Design, maintain, and improve automated test suites that remain reliable, readable, maintainable, and effective within CI environments.
- Triage complex test failures and distinguish flaky tests from genuine regressions, particularly across high-traffic, high-risk, or highly integrated areas.
- Mentor QA Engineers within the squad and across the wider QA community, raising standards around automation, test design, and engineering practices.
- Represent the squad in broader QA initiatives and contribute to chapter-wide standards, tooling decisions, onboarding resources, and testing practices.
- Take ownership of a strategic QA initiative, such as a contract-testing framework, performance-testing toolkit, testing discipline, or AI-assisted test generation workflow.
- Actively leverage AI and LLM tooling for test case generation, synthetic data creation, regression triage, documentation, and other areas where automation can accelerate QA work.
Requirements
- 5+ years of QA engineering experience in a software product environment, with demonstrated ownership of testing strategy for complex technical domains.
- Strong test automation engineering skills, with the ability to write production-quality tests in Java, Python, or JavaScript and build stable, maintainable suites that run effectively in CI.
- Deep experience with API testing, including REST APIs, contract testing, integration testing, HTTP semantics, and JSON schema validation.
- Hands-on experience with performance and load testing, including designing tests, interpreting throughput and concurrency results, identifying bottlenecks, and translating findings into engineering action.
- Strong experience working in Java-based backend environments, with the ability to understand application architecture, read Java code, and create tests that accurately reflect system behavior.
- High level of technical autonomy and confidence operating without a dedicated QA manager, with the ability to make sound quality decisions and represent QA practices across teams.
- Proven ability to mentor other QA engineers, improve engineering standards, and lead through technical expertise rather than formal authority.
- Experience in fintech, payments, or digital financial services is strongly preferred, particularly where reliability and correctness are critical.
- Familiarity with contract testing tools such as Pact or equivalent approaches within microservices environments is a strong advantage.
- Mobile testing experience, particularly Android, using tools such as Espresso or Appium, or structured manual testing supported by regression frameworks, is beneficial.
- Experience contributing to a QA chapter, guild, community of practice, or internal training program is valued.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted QA workflows, including LLM-based test generation, regression analysis, and synthetic test data creation, is a plus.
Benefits
- Opportunity to work as a senior technical individual contributor with substantial ownership and influence.
- Full integration into a product squad, with a direct role in engineering decisions and product delivery rather than functioning as a downstream QA resource.
- Opportunity to shape testing standards, architecture, tooling, and quality practices beyond your immediate squad.
- Strong platform for technical leadership and mentoring without requiring a transition into people management.
- Exposure to complex, high-scale fintech and digital financial services systems where software quality has a direct customer and business impact.
- Opportunity to lead organization-wide QA initiatives and introduce improved testing disciplines and tooling.
- Flexible European-based working environment with collaboration across international engineering teams.
- Opportunity to work with AI-assisted testing and modern QA automation practices as part of an evolving engineering environment.