Huxley
QA Engineer
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QA Engineer
📍 Location: London or Glasgow based candidate
⏰ Working Hours: Standard
🏠 Remote Working: Hybrid, with an expectation of 1 to 2 days a week in the office (additional days depending on activity, e.g. a design workshop).
📄 Employment Type: Permanent
💷 Salary: £45,000 - £55,000 based on skills & experience
Main Purpose of Job
Operating within SThree's Product, Delivery & Quality function, the QA Engineer is an embedded member of a cross-functional squad, accountable for building quality into the product from the outset rather than inspecting for it at the end. This is a modern, shift-left quality role: you work alongside engineers, product and design to ensure that what the squad delivers is functionally correct, resilient, secure and genuinely fit for purpose.
You combine hands-on test design and automation with a broader quality-advocacy remit; championing whole-team ownership of quality, strengthening the squad's testing capability, and providing clear, evidence-based assurance of release readiness. You treat automated checks as fast feedback that protects delivery velocity, and you focus test effort where the risk to users and the business is greatest.
Why Join SThree?
You'll join a global organisation building modern products in cross-functional squads, where quality is a whole-team responsibility and testers are engineers in their own right, not a downstream gate.
In this role you'll have real influence over how we build and release software:
- Shaping testability from the first conversation.
- Automating the checks that keep us fast and safe.
- Giving the squad the confidence to ship.
Role Requirements
Quality Strategy & Shift-Left
- Own the test approach for the squad's product area; embed quality across the lifecycle rather than at an end-stage gate.
- Contribute to story refinement and own the testing and quality content of the Definition of Done; ensure acceptance criteria are testable and unambiguous before work is committed.
- Apply risk-based prioritisation (RICE / MoSCoW) to focus test effort where defect impact and likelihood are highest.
Test Design & Execution
- Design, maintain and execute functional, integration and end-to-end test cases traceable to acceptance criteria.
- Perform exploratory and edge-case testing to surface defects that scripted coverage misses.
- Validate cross-browser, cross-device and cross-environment behaviour as relevant to the product.
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Automation & Continuous Testing
- Build and maintain automated test suites (unit-support, API, UI/E2E) and integrate them into the CI/CD pipeline as quality gates.
- Treat automated checks as fitness functions: fast feedback that blocks regressions before merge or release.
- Balance the automation pyramid; keep the suite reliable, low-flake and maintainable.
API & Contract Assurance
- Own contract testing for services the squad consumes and produces, supporting a contract-first design approach.
- Validate API behaviour, error handling, versioning and backward compatibility independently of the UI.
Non-Functional Testing
- Coordinate or execute performance, load, resilience, security and accessibility testing appropriate to the product's risk profile.
- Flag non-functional risks early and ensure they carry acceptance criteria, not just functional ones.
Squad Collaboration & Quality Advocacy
- Operate as an embedded member of a cross-functional squad, pairing with engineers and product to build in quality.
- Champion whole-team ownership of quality; coach the squad on testability, test data and defect prevention.
- Contribute to retrospectives with quality insights and improvement actions.
Defect & Environment Management
- Triage, log, prioritise and track defects to closure with clear reproduction steps and severity.
- Manage test data and test environment readiness; ensure representative, compliant data for realistic testing.
Metrics & Reporting
- Maintain quality signals (coverage, escaped defects, flake rate, cycle-time impact) and report status in a form the squad and stakeholders can act on.
- Provide release-readiness assurance and a clear, evidence-based go / no-go input.
Continuous Improvement
- Promote a culture of continuous improvement, using quality insights from testing and retrospectives to strengthen how the squad builds and releases.
Person Specification
Skills, Knowledge & Experience
- Demonstrable experience as a QA / Test Engineer within an agile, product-focused environment.
- Hands-on test automation experience across API and UI/E2E layers (e.g. Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, RestAssured or similar).
- Strong grounding in test design techniques and risk-based prioritisation (e.g. RICE / MoSCoW).
- Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines as quality gates.
- Working knowledge of contract testing and API assurance (e.g. Pact, Postman) independent of the UI.
- Familiarity with non-functional testing: performance, load, resilience, security and accessibility.
- Confident with defect management and test tooling (e.g. JIRA, Zephyr/Xray, TestRail).
- Sound understanding of test data and environment management, including compliant, representative data.
- Able to read and reason about application code sufficiently to design effective tests and pair with engineers.
- Strong communication skills; able to translate quality signals into clear, actionable insight for the squad and stakeholders.
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Qualifications
- ISTQB certification (Foundation as a minimum; Advanced desirable) or equivalent demonstrable expertise.
- Relevant degree or equivalent experience in a technical discipline.
- Agile / Scrum accreditation (desirable).
- Certifications in test automation, performance or security testing (desirable).
Key Personal Attributes
- Quality-obsessed, with a preventative rather than reactive mindset.
- Pragmatic; balances thoroughness with delivery pace.
- Collaborative and influential; builds a quality culture across the team.
- Curious and rigorous, with strong attention to detail.
- Comfortable operating with autonomy in a fast-paced, changing environment.
What's in it for you?
- Hybrid working options for flexibility.
- Bonus linked to company and personal performance.
- 28 days holiday plus public holidays, with an annual leave purchase scheme.
- Private healthcare, discounted dental insurance, and health cashback scheme.
- Paid volunteering days and caregiver leave.
- Access to retail discounts and our company share scheme.
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