Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

Digital Waffle; Manchester; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Digital Waffle is seeking a Senior Software Test Engineer who treats testing as an engineering discipline and shapes how software is designed, built, tested, and released. You’ll collaborate with developers, product managers and designers to identify risk early and build effective automated test strategies.

You’ll influence testing practices, raise quality across the engineering team, and work on modern digital products with scope for automation, exploratory testing, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software testing or quality engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated tests across UI, API and integration layers.
• Experience testing modern web apps, SaaS platforms, or customer-facing digital products.

Responsibilities

• Engineer automated tests across UI, API and integration layers; choose the right level of automation.
• Build and maintain regression suites for fast, meaningful feedback and frequent releases.
• Collaborate with developers early to identify risks and make requirements testable.
• Use exploratory and manual testing where automation misses issues.
• Apply risk-based testing to focus on high-impact areas and verify release readiness.
• Investigate failures and resolve defects with engineers rather than only reporting them.
• Contribute to security testing using OWASP principles and lightweight threat modelling.
• Incorporate WCAG accessibility testing into development processes.
• Help improve test architecture, tooling, environments and processes.

Skills

Automated testing

UI testing

API testing

Performance testing

Security testing

Accessibility testing

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

Postman

REST Assured

Risk-based testing

Shift-left testing

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

Postman

REST Assured

Job description

Build quality in. Automate intelligently. Influence how software is delivered.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Test Engineer who sees testing as an engineering discipline, not something that happens at the end of a development cycle.

Vous’ll have a genuine opportunity to influence how software is designed, built, tested, and released across a range of modern digital products. Working closely with developers, product managers, and designers, you’ll help identify risk early, build effective automated test strategies, and give the team confidence to release frequently.

We’re a collaborative engineering environment where automation, exploratory testing, technical problem-solving, and continuous improvement are valued. You’ll have the autonomy to challenge existing approaches, introduce better ways of working, and help raise the bar for quality across the wider engineering team.

What you’ll be working on

• Engineer robust automated tests across UI, API, and integration layers, choosing the right level of automation for the problem.
• Build and maintain reliable regression suites that provide fast, meaningful feedback and support confident, frequent releases.
• Work alongside developers from the earliest stages of development to identify risks, challenge assumptions, and make requirements genuinely testable.
• Use exploratory and manual testing strategically to uncover issues that automation alone won’t find.
• Apply risk-based testing to focus effort where it matters most and provide clear, evidence-based recommendations on release readiness.
• Investigate failures, identify root causes, and work with engineers to resolve defects rather than simply reporting them.
• Contribute to security focused testing, applying OWASP principles and lightweight threat-modelling techniques to identify potential vulnerabilities.
• Help build accessible products by incorporating WCAG and accessibility testing into the development process.
• Improve our test architecture, tooling, environments, and processes to make testing easier and more effective for the whole engineering team.

What you’ll bring:

• 6+ years’ experience in software testing, test engineering, or quality engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience designing and maintaining automated tests across UI, API, and integration layers.
• Experience testing modern web applications, SaaS platforms, or customer-facing digital products.
• Practical experience with performance testing and an understanding of how to identify and investigate performance risks.
• Experience with tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Postman, and/or REST Assured.
• A strong understanding of modern quality engineering principles, including risk-based testing, shift-left testing, test automation strategy, and continuous testing.
• Knowledge of security testing principles, ideally including OWASP.
• An understanding of accessibility testing and WCAG.

Why this role?

This isn't a role where you'll be handed a set of test scripts and asked to work through them.

You'll have the opportunity to shape the way quality is engineered, influence technical decisions, and help build testing practices that scale as our products