Senior Software Development Engineer in Test

HOLLAND AND BARRETT; Greater London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading health and wellness company in Greater London is seeking a Senior SDET to modernize testing platforms and practices. You will collaborate with engineering and product teams, design automation frameworks, and implement a test-first mindset. The ideal candidate will have a strong software engineering background and experience with microservice testing approaches. This role promises an exciting opportunity to impact the company's eCommerce Engineering organisation significantly.

Benefits

Health Cash Plan

Life Assurance

Bonus Scheme

Private Medical care

FREE at-home blood test kit

Holiday Purchase option

Qualifications

• Strong experience in software engineering in any language.
• Experience in building automation frameworks from scratch.
• Solid understanding of microservice testing approaches.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain scalable automation frameworks.
• Partner with teams to introduce modern microservices testing.
• Lead engineers to adopt best testing practices.

Skills

Strong software engineering background

Automation frameworks development

Microservice testing knowledge

CI/CD proficiency

Collaborative style

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Job description

About H&B

Holland & Barrett International strives to be the world's leading health and wellness business. Currently the largest in Europe and growing in other markets, the health and wellness of our colleagues and customers is at our heart.

Technology at H&B

We're on a mission to make health and wellness a way of life for everyone - and technology is at the heart of our future to become a leading omni-channel retailer. We're building some great products, and we're investing in the rapidly advancing technology that is helping our customers meet their health and wellness goals. We're delivering more speed in the retail experience, greater convenience in service and delivery, and increasing personalisation in our brand and product propositions, both in-store and online.

Collaborative, working at pace and always with a strong customer focus in everything we do. We love the cloud, we prefer building the right solutions over buying generic ones, and we embrace automation and testing in all things software, infrastructure, and data.

About the Role

We're at an exciting moment in our engineering journey. As we modernise our platforms and ways of working, we're also re‑introducing what "good" looks like for quality at Holland & Barrett.

We're moving from traditional testing approaches towards a modern, engineering‑led quality strategy: unit testing, contract testing, component testing, integration testing, E2E flows, synthetics, and strong observability across our microservices.

We're looking for a Senior SDET who is hands‑on, highly technical, and passionate about setting teams up for long‑term success. In this role, you'll build the frameworks, tools, and practices that empower engineers to write and maintain their own tests - with you acting as the subject‑matter expert, coach, and quality advocate who helps them get there.

This is a high‑impact role within our eCommerce Engineering organisation (web and mobile). You'll collaborate closely with engineers, designers and product teams to embed a test‑first mindset and raise the bar for reliability, delivery confidence, and customer experience.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable automation frameworks that are easy for engineers to use and extend.
• Partner with teams to introduce modern microservices testing approaches across unit, contract, component, integration and E2E layers.
• Lead the shift towards engineers owning their tests by providing guidance, examples, and hands‑on pairing to help teams adopt best practices confidently.
• Collaborate with Engineering and DevOps to evolve CI/CD pipelines and embed automation earlier in the lifecycle.
• Improve observability around testing and reliability, integrating logs, traces, metrics, synthetics, and alerts to increase confidence in releases.
• Promote good testing principles and high‑quality engineering practices across teams; become a trusted voice for quality.
• Act as a consultant‑style partner to squads, helping them design testable systems and adopt pragmatic approaches to automation.
• Support a culture where quality is shared by everyone, not a separate phase or team.
• Demonstrate excellent attention to detail and help others develop the same discipline.

Key Requirement

What you'll bring

Essential:

• Strong software engineering background in any language.
• Proven experience building automation frameworks from scratch.
• Solid understanding of microservice testing approaches: unit, contract, component, integration, and E2E.
• Experience with tools such as Playwright, Cypress, JUnit, WireMock, or similar.
• Strong CI/CD knowledge (GitLab CI, Jenkins, etc.) and familiarity with Infrastructure‑as‑Code and cloud‑native environments (containers, Kubernetes).
• Understanding of observability (Grafana, Datadog, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, etc.) and how it supports quality and testing.
• Ability to explain technical concepts clearly to different audiences.
• A collaborative style, with experience driving culture change or elevating quality practices across multiple squads.

Nice to have:

• Experience writing in JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Kotlin or Go.
• Experience with React Native test automation.
• Experience testing AI/ML systems.
• Exposure to building internal developer platforms or quality‑focused tooling.
• Experience in software engineering, SRE, DevOps, or developer experience teams.

Our tech stack

• Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Java/Kotlin Spring boot, Go
• Frontend: React, React Native
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, GitLab CI/CD
• Testing: Playwright, BrowserStack
• Architecture: Microservices

A note on applying

We know that great people don't always see themselves in every requirement. If this role inspires you and you believe your skills and experience could make a positive impact here, we'd really love to hear from you. Please apply, even if you don't meet every single requirement.

What we offer

Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits

• Health Cash Plan
• Life Assurance
• Bonus Scheme - Based on company & personal performance
• Virtual GP
• Private Medical care
• FREE at‑home blood test kit
• Holiday Purchase option
• Pension Contribution scheme
• Access to 'Wellhub' with gyms, studios and wellbeing apps

Discounts & Savings

• 25% Colleague Discount with FREE Standard Delivery
• Exclusive Discounts from a wide range of partners
• £/€50 Annual Product Allowance to spend in store

Learning & Development

• Access to a variety of learning opportunities, including Level 2‑5 Apprenticeships, Workshops and our Digital Learning Library
• AND MORE!

Holland and Barrett is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome diverse perspectives and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all colleagues. We understand that when our colleagues are listened to, respected and valued for who they are, we build an organisation with belonging at its heart - making health and wellness a way of life for everyone.

Holland & Barrett does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms/recruiters. Please do not forward resumes to our job alias, employees, or any other company location. Holland & Barrett is not and will not be responsible for any fees if a candidate submitted by a search firm/recruiter unless otherwise agreed with respect to specific open position(s).