Automation QA Engineer for API-First Systems

Jobtailor

Dublin

On-site

EUR 70,000 - 95,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Jobtailor is seeking a senior automation engineer to define and evolve our test strategy across product areas. You will focus on API automation, contract testing, and resilient CI/CD integration to improve release confidence.

You will collaborate with design and engineering to ensure scalable, testable systems and robust production telemetry for continuous improvement.

Qualifications

Design and implement automation strategies for API-first or distributed systems.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve automation strategy across product areas with risk-based test coverage.

Skills

Automation strategy

Test pyramid

Contract testing

UI automation

C#/.NET

SQL

CI/CD with test reporting

Microservices

Async/event-driven

OAuth2/OpenID Connect

Distributed systems

Tools

Docker

Job description

• Define and evolve automation strategy across one or more product areas, aligning test coverage to real operational risk.
• Ensure acceptance criteria are clear, testable, and aligned to system behaviour and production impact.
• Build and maintain automated tests across appropriate layers of the test pyramid, with strong API and contract-level coverage.
• Reduce reliance on brittle end-to-end tests by strengthening service-level and boundary validation.
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines with meaningful reporting and quality gates that improve release confidence.
• Collaborate early in design discussions to improve system testability and prevent defects before implementation.
• Validate distributed and event-driven workflows, including asynchronous processing, retries, idempotency, and cross-service interactions.
• Design repeatable, environment-safe test data strategies.
• Contribute to performance, resilience, and reliability validation.
• Ensure authentication, authorisation, and tenancy boundaries are correctly enforced.
• Lead root cause analysis for quality-related incidents and use production telemetry to strengthen future coverage.
• Improve shared testing frameworks, standards, and practices while coaching engineers on writing stronger, more meaningful tests.

Requirements

Strong experience designing and implementing automation strategies for API-first or distributed systems.
Deep understanding of the test pyramid, risk-based testing, and automation-first principles.
Proven experience with API automation and contract testing approaches.
Experience with modern UI automation tools (e.g. Playwright or similar) where appropriate.
Comfortable working in strongly typed ecosystems, ideally within .NET / C# environments.
Practical SQL skills for data validation, troubleshooting, and investigation.
Experience working in CI/CD environments with automated quality gates and integrated test reporting.
Familiarity with containerised environments such as Docker.
Strong understanding of microservices patterns, distributed system risks, and failure modes.
Experience validating asynchronous and event-driven workflows.
Working knowledge of authentication and authorisation concepts such as OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.

Core Competencies

Demonstrates expertise in designing and implementing automation strategies for API-first and distributed systems, with a strong focus on test pyramid principles and risk-based testing. Proficient in integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and validating asynchronous workflows while ensuring robust authentication and authorization practices.

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