Senior QA Engineer - Manchester

Resident Advisor; Manchester; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous annual leave

Matched pension

Wellbeing initiatives

Staff social events

Volunteering allowance

Job summary

RA Resident Advisor in Manchester is seeking a Senior QA Engineer to own test quality across ra.co, iOS/Android apps, and RA Scan. You’ll work across five product teams, maintain healthy automation, and test high-risk releases yourself. You’ll also mentor teams and leverage AI tools to improve testing.

You will contribute to test plans, review plans, and ensure tests align with product risk. The role blends hands-on testing with collaboration across developers and managers in a fast-paced

Qualifications

• Several years in QA or test engineering, typically four or more, testing web and mobile products.
• Hands-on test automation: built and maintained automated tests that run in CI for web and mobile.
• We use JavaScript, TypeScript, Kotlin or Swift for writing tests with developers.
• Ability to test APIs and verify data with SQL.
• Good judgement about risk: what to test deeply, what lightly, and what not at all.
• Experience using AI tools in testing and knowing their limits.
• Clear writing: bug reports and test plans that others can act on.

Responsibilities

• Keep the web end-to-end test suite healthy: fix flaky tests, add coverage for new features, and ensure failing suites are fixed quickly.
• Grow automated testing for iOS, Android apps and RA Scan with app developers so mobile tests run on every change.
• Test high-risk releases yourself, such as payments and checkout, including edge cases and failures.
• Review test plans and help teams improve them.
• Use AI tools to write and maintain tests, and guide developers to use them.
• Brief external testing partner and review results they send back.
• Report bugs clearly and track them to resolution with engineers and product managers.
• Track metrics like bugs reaching production and reliability of automated tests.

Skills

QA automation

CI testing

JavaScript

TypeScript

Kotlin

Swift

API testing

SQL

AI tools in testing

Bug reporting

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

XCUITest

Espresso

Job description

About RA Resident Advisor

has been a home for electronic music culture since 2001. Event discovery, ticketing, news and long-form editorial, artist profiles, original films, and a weekly mix series two decades deep. Around 7 million people use the web platform every month, with a wider audience across our apps and other channels. Underneath the platform sits a network of contributors and city managers across dozens of cities, which is how we stay connected to the scenes we cover rather than reporting on them from a distance. RA is 25 years old, independent, B.Corp certified and intent on being indispensable to the artists, promoters and audiences who make this culture.

Purpose of the role

As our Senior QA Engineer, you'll look after the quality of ra.co , our iOS and Android apps, and RA Scan, the app promoters use to scan tickets at the door. You'll work across five product teams. Each team writes and runs its own tests. You'll help them do it well, keep the automated test suites healthy, and test the riskiest releases yourself. Some of what we ship carries real risk: payments, checkout, and getting people into venues on the night. Other changes are a line of copy. You'll help us tell the two apart and test each one accordingly. We use AI tools across development, and you'll help the teams use them to write better tests, faster.

Key responsibilities

• Keep the web end-to-end test suite healthy: fix flaky tests, add coverage for new features, and make sure a failing suite gets fixed quickly
• Grow automated testing for our iOS and Android apps and RA Scan with the app developers, so mobile tests run on every change
• Test high-risk releases yourself, such as payments and checkout, including edge cases and what happens when things fail
• Review the test plans teams write, and help them improve
• Use AI tools to write and maintain tests, help developers do the same, and check what the tools produceli>
• Brief our external testing partner and review the results they send back
• Report bugs clearly, and follow them through with developers and product managers
• Track a few simple measures, such as bugs that reach production and how reliable the automated tests are

We're looking for

• Several years in QA or test engineering, typically four or more, testing web and mobile products
• Hands-on test automation: you've built and maintained automated tests that run in CI, for web (for example Playwright, Cypress or Selenium) and ideally mobile. We use XCUITest on iOS and Espresso with Kotlin on Android
• Enough coding to write and fix tests alongside developers, in a language such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Kotlin or Swift
• You can test APIs and check data with SQL
• Good judgement about risk: what to test deeply, what lightly, and what not at all
• You've used AI tools in your testing work, and know where they help and where they don't
• Clear writing: bug reports and test plans other people can act on

If you meet most of these but not all, we'd still like to hear from you. Nobody arrives with all of it, and we'll help you grow into the rest.

Nice to have

• CircleCI or a similar CI tool
• Working with an external testing partner
• Payments, checkout or ticketing systems
• Testing apps used at live events, with poor networks
• Test management tools such as Qase or TestRail

What we offer you

• Generous annual leave policies aimed at promoting work-life balance.
• Matched pension, or 401k for US staff.
• Comprehensive staff wellbeing initiatives, featuring regular activities and workplace programmes to support mental and physical health. This includes discounted ClassPass memberships and custom-fitted earplugs.
• Company-led social events, team lunches, and discounts on merch.
• Paid annual volunteering allowance, encouraging contributions to community projects and charities you care about.
• A transparent internal company culture committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (see: https://ra.co/about/diversity ).
• Active involvement in community projects within the electronic music community (see: https://ra.co/about/community ).

More about RA

We are independent and we intend to stay that way. 25 years in, RA answers to the culture it came from rather than to outside stakeholders. That is what enables us to make decisions on a long-term basis. Our staff, contributors and international teams are not observers. They are part of the scenes we cover, and that is what we hire for. Craft first, and then a genuine stake in this music rather than just a job in it. RA has been B Corp certified since 2024, which holds us to standards on social and environmental impact we would want to meet regardless of the badge. We especially welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds, abilities, ethnicities, experiences, gender identities, and sexual orientations.

Our values

Electronic music is art. We celebrate the progressive values that underpin electronic music. We advocate for a more inclusive and equitable electronic music community. We honour the past, present and future of electronic mus