Senior QA Engineer (m/f/d) - Quality Strategy & Automation

Retarus; Lisboa; Remote; EUR 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mobile working & flexible hours

Collaborative culture & great team

Flat hierarchies & feedback culture

Development opportunities & career

International collaboration across 4+2

Modern, dog-friendly offices & perks

Company-paid health insurance & lunchV

Public transport benefits

Job summary

Retarus is a worldwide provider of cloud-based messaging solutions at enterprise scale, serving over 40% of S&P Global 100 companies. With about 500 employees across 19 offices, Retarus values collaboration, diversity, and a dynamic, globally connected workplace.

We are seeking a Senior QA Engineer to own quality strategy, drive shift-left initiatives, and lead automation efforts. You will collaborate across product, analytics, and DevOps to ensure robust end-to-end testing and high release

Responsibilities

• Quality Strategy & Shift-Left Integration: Own the Business Logic by partnering with product owners, analysts, QA peers, and developers to dissect workflows and identify edge cases.
• Architect the QA Plan: Assess coverage and constraints to establish a risk-based strategy including exploratory, integration, and E2E testing.
• Mentor & Elevate the QA Team: Serve as the technical anchor, guide testing efforts, and upskill the team in modern automation practices.
• Make Quality Visible: Build coverage matrices and dashboards showing release confidence, testing gaps, and risks for stakeholders.
• Hands-On Automation & Engineering: Collaborate with DevOps and Backend QA to ensure end-to-end test coverage across the product stack.
• Build Resilient Automation: Develop and maintain E2E tests with Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript) and targeted API/integration tests.
• Navigate Enterprise Reality: Use synthetic data, mocks, and stubs when test data is scarce or shared.
• CI/CD & Pipeline Health: Integrate test execution into CI/CD, diagnose failures, and reduce flaky tests.
• Telemetry & AI: Leverage production telemetry and JetBrains AI to accelerate test code and identify missing scenarios.

Job description

Become Senior QA Engineer (m/f/d) - Quality Strategy & Automation at Retarus.

Retarus is a worldwide provider of cloud-based messaging solutions at enterprise scale. We serve over 40% of the companies listed on the S&P Global 100, e.g. Adidas, Bayer, SAP, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, T-Systems, Swarovski & UPS, as well as governmental agencies and major players in markets across the world. Privately owned and founder-managed for over thirty years, Retarus is customer-oriented, stable, a fair employer, and a strategic business partner with a long-term vision. With some 500 employees in 19 offices on four continents, Retarus operates locally and thinks globally: our teams are organized across borders and are highly integrated. This makes Retarus a multicultural, multilingual, and engaging workplace. We are committed to creating a diverse and dynamic environment for our employees, with generous compensation, time off, and a global, collaborative workplace.

What we offer

• Mobile working and flexible working time
• Collaborative, diverse company culture and superior team spirit
• Flat hierarchies and great feedback culture
• Development opportunities & career perspective
• International business & cross-site collaboration
• Modern, dog-friendly offices with nice amenities
• Company-paid health insurance, public transportation, lunch vouchers and further benefits

What you’ll do

• Quality Strategy & Shift-Left Integration- Own the Business Logic: Partner with product owners, functional analysts, QA peers, and developers to dissect workflows, identify edge cases, and challenge assumptions before a single line of code is written.
• Architect the QA Plan: Assess existing coverage and constraints to establish a risk-based strategy encompassing exploratory, integration, and E2E testing.
• Mentor & Elevate the QA Team: Act as the technical anchor for fellow QA engineers. Guide their daily testing efforts, ensure strict alignment with the overarching QA strategy, and continuously upskill the team on modern automation practices.
• Make Quality Visible: Build coverage matrices and dashboards that clearly communicate release confidence, testing gaps, and risks to both technical and business stakeholders.

Hands-On Automation & Engineering

• Hands-On Automation & Engineering- Bridge Cross-Functional Environments: Partner directly with DevOps and Backend QA teams to eliminate environment discrepancies, resolve complex cross-domain test data constraints, and ensure unbroken end-to-end test coverage across the full product stack.
• Build Resilient Automation: Develop and maintain reliable E2E tests using Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript), alongside targeted API and integration suites. Focus strictly on high-value, repeatable scenarios.
• Co-drive Testability & Best Practices: Modify application components directly to ensure reliable test targeting (e.g., injecting data-testid attributes), and lead technical discussions with the team on how to maximize Playwright’s API capabilities.
• Navigate Enterprise Reality: Design effective testing approaches when test data is scarce, shared, or inconsistent using synthetic data, mocks, and stubs.
• CI/CD & Pipeline Health: Collaborate with the Tech Lead to integrate test execution into CI/CD pipelines, aggressively investigate failures, and eradicate flaky tests.

Continuous Improvement via Telemetry & AI

• Leverage Production Data: Use production telemetry (Sentry), reported incidents, and security findings to continuously patch regression gaps and adapt the testing strategy.
• Multiply Impact with AI: Utilize JetBrains AI to accelerate test code development, analyze specifications, and identify missing test scenarios.

Success in your first 6 months looks like:

We give you the space to succeed. You will be shielded from standard sprint deliverables so you can