Staff QA Engineer

JobCubby; Greater London; On-site; GBP 75,000 - 80,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible holidays up to 40 days per yr

Wellbeing allowance £400/yr

Private medical insurance

Books, E-books & podcasts allowance

Contributory pension scheme

Employee discounts across brands

Job summary

Reward Gateway in London is seeking a Staff QA Engineer to join the QA COE as a senior individual contributor responsible for quality governance and hands-on engineering. You will set standards, drive automation, and lead QA for large programmes.

This technical lead role reports to the Head of QA, with no direct people management, and supports a flexible hybrid work model with two days in the Dean Street office.

Qualifications

• Senior QA Engineer with staff/lead level experience.
• Experience leading test strategy for large cross‑team programmes.
• Strong automation and API testing experience.

Responsibilities

• Set quality engineering standards and automation strategy across squads and governance for major programmes.
• Lead test strategy reviews and own the automation framework for technical domains.
• Coordinate QA sign-off, risk escalation, and release readiness for strategic initiatives.
• Contribute to QA Community of Practice with best practices and tooling updates.

Skills

Quality Engineering Leadership

Test automation

CI/CD

API testing

Distributed teams

Tools

Cypress

Selenium

Playwright

JMeter

Symfony/PHPUnit

Python testing

Job description

Staff QA Engineer

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: London

Reporting To: Head of QA Engineering

Compensation: £75,000 - £80,000 / year

Reward Gateway, part of Edenred, is a global leader in benefits and employee engagement. We help businesses attract, engage, and retain top talent through strategic reward, recognition, and well-being solutions.

Guided by our shared missions - ‘Making the World a Better Place to Work’ and ‘Enriching Connections, For Good’ - we’re committed to transforming workplaces and improving people’s daily lives.

Our team embodies entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, and respect. We push boundaries, speak up, and stay human, fostering a culture where imagination thrives.

Your Role in Our Mission

The Staff QA Engineer is a senior individual contributor within the QA COE, reporting directly to the Head of QA. This role combines deep technical quality engineering expertise with QA management responsibility for large strategic programmes.

This role operates at the intersection of hands‑on quality engineering and programme‑level quality governance - setting standards across squads, leading test strategy for strategic initiatives, and driving quality culture across the engineering organisation.

This is not a people management role. It is a technical lead role with programme testing governance accountability. You will largely focus on:

• a) Quality Engineering Leadership Driving quality engineering standards, automation strategy, and testing best practices across the allocated engineering squads. Acting as the technical lead on test architecture, tooling decisions, and shift-left implementation.
• b) Large Programme QA Management Providing dedicated QA management and governance for strategic change programmes. Owning the test strategy, quality gates, go/no-go sign-off authority, and risk escalation for each programme.

What’s In It For Me?

A chance to be part of an extremely well established, stable and high growth ‘Unicorn’ SaaS company with over 50 benefits in our employee benefits package, including:

• A flexible holiday plan of up to 40 days per year
• £400 a year Wellbeing Allowance
• Private Medical Insurance
• Allowance for professional development books, E-books, and podcasts
• Contributory pension scheme
• Employee, friends and family discounts across 1200+ retail, hospitality and lifestyle brands

Flexible hybrid working:

Collaboration, connection as a team, and strong internal relationships are part of the “RG Magic” that makes our culture thrive. Our team works from our Dean Street office two days per week.

What You’ll be Doing:

Quality Engineering – Standards, automation & Practices

• Track and maintain the Definition of Readiness (DoR) quality criteria across all squads, ensuring quality is embedded before development begins.
• Review and improve the test pyramid per squad - driving the rebalance toward meaningful unit, integration, and E2E coverage (target: 60-20-20).
• Lead test strategy reviews for critical coverage areas.
• Own the automation strategy for allocated Technical domains.
• Drive API integration testing strategy framework standardisation.
• Be a key contributor in QA Community of Practice - monthly sessions sharing best practices, shift-left learnings, and tooling updates.
• Conduct quarterly testing efficiency audits across squads - identify coverage gaps, flaky test patterns, and automation opportunities.
• Contribute to the AI-driven QE roadmap - evaluating AI test generation, self-healing automation, and defect prediction tooling as the QA CoE evolves.

Test Management:

• Own the end-to-end test strategy for assigned strategic programmes - covering functional, non-functional, integration, performance, security, and data validation testing.
• Establish quality gates and go/no-go decision criteria for each programme milestone.
• Provide QA sign-off authority - confirming testing completed, critical defects resolved, regression passed, known issues documented, and QA exit criteria met.
• Coordinate cross-squad testing dependencies - large programmes touch multiple product pillars and require integrated test planning across teams.
• Prepare and present programme quality status to the Head of QA (weekly) and to programme steering committees as required.
• Manage programme-level defect triage and prioritisation - ensuring severity and priority dimensions are applied consistently.
• Lead Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for programme-related production incidents - documenting findings and driving preventive actions.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• Partner with Heads of Engineering, Squad Leads, and Product Managers to embed quality thinking at every stage of the development lifecycle.
• Participate in release retros as the QA quality lens - providing neutral, systemic improvement recommendations.
• Represent QA in 3 Amigos sessions - supporting squads in defining acceptance criteria, edge cases, and non‑functional requirements at story level.
• Build strong relationships with the QA team - supporting current QA engineers.

The Experience and Key Skills you will have:

• Demonstrable Quality Engineering / QA experience, including proven experience at Staff or Lead level.
• Track record leading test strategy for large, cross-team programmes - not just squad-level testing.
• Deep technical expertise in test automation frameworks - Cypress, Selenium, Playwright, Jmeter or equivalent.
• Previous experience with PHP testing ecosystems (Symfony/PHPUnit) or Python testing frameworks - ability to lead framework standardisation decisions.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, branching strategies, and test integration at the pipeline level.
• Experience with API testing, contract testing, and integration testing patterns for microservices and monolith architectures.
• Experience with shift-left quality practices.
• Proven ability to define and enforce quality gates, go/no-go criteria, and release readiness conditions for strategic programmes.
• Excellent communication skills - proven ability to present quality status to senior engineering and product leadership.
• Prior experience working with distributed teams across multiple locations.

Desirable:

• Understanding and experience of AI/ML testing approaches - LLM output quality, hallucination detection, agentic AI assurance.

The Interview Process:

• Screening call with a member of the Talent Acquisition Team
• First stage interview with one of the Staff QA’s / Engineering Manager
• Final stage interview with Head of QA

At Reward Gateway | Edenred we are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for all candidates. If you have any specific requirements or need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the recruitment journey, please let your Talent Acquisition Partner know. Your needs are important to us, and we want to ensure an equitable experience for every candidate.

Be comfortable. Be you.

We want every employee to feel comfortable bringing their passion, creativity, and individuality to work. We value all cultures, backgrounds, and experiences, because we believe diversity drives innovation and makes us stronger. Our approach to hiring and building teams is about more than filling roles - it’s about creating an environment where everyone can thrive, feel supported, and contribute to our mission of making the world a better place to work!