Financial Times
Software Engineer in Test Automation
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Software Engineer in Test Automation
About The Financial Times
The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, globally recognised for its authority, integrity, and accuracy. With a shared mission to deliver quality information and services worldwide, our culture thrives on curiosity and ambitions of innovation. Our Product & Tech teams drive innovation in an ever-evolving digital landscape, serving millions of digital subscribers daily.
A growing, diverse, and dynamic community of product, technology, delivery, and data specialists powers our vision. At the FT, you’ll find a culture characterised by entrepreneurial energy, flexibility, and every opportunity to pour your skill into success.
Launch a newsworthy career with one of the world’s most influential news organisations.
Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
We welcome unique perspectives and foster a supportive workplace where employees feel empowered to operate at their full potential. Our mission is to scaffold out barriers, especially for underrepresented groups.
Software Engineer in Test Automation
Join the Mobile Apps Team
We seek a specialist in Test Automation with a passion for building scalable, robust quality systems and automated safeguards to protect the integrity of our world-class digital products.
Based in the Mobile Apps team—part of a multidisciplinary, cross-functional collective—you’ll collaborate with engineers, product managers, business analysts, designers, and QA specialists to engineer scalable automation frameworks. You’ll implement and maintain crucial parts of CI/CD pipelines ensuring high confidence for every deployment across our web and mobile platforms.
Key Responsibilities
Automation, Tooling & Quality Systems
- Design and build reusable, performant test frameworks using tools (e.g., Selenium, Cypress, Appium, or Playwright)
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to iterate faster while ensuring reliability
- Optimise test suites for:
- Speed (mitigating slow tests)
- Stability (eliminating flakiness)
- Diagnosability (clear failure signals)
- Oversee infrastructure and suite management tools for distributed/parallel execution (e.g., Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, AWS Device Farm)
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Test Strategy & Quality Practices
- Collaborate with teams to shift quality left, integrating risk assessment and testability into designs
- Decompose requirements into coverage-justified functional, regression, smoke, and integration tests
- Ensure testability by design through data-driven, deterministic testing strategies
- Balance development velocity with risk containment
- Define smart trade-offs between speed, quality, and release confidence
Monitoring, Troubleshooting & Collaboration
- Cross-sectional troubleshooting for flaky tests, false positives, and deep-rooted causes
- Partner with teams on improving CI/CD efficiency and tighter feedback loops -Champion test engineering best practices by participating in broader QA/community knowledge-sharing -Empower teams to own invention of quality without reliance on central QA
Essential Requirements
To take this role successfully, you should:
- Demonstrate strategic thinking in test maturity progression (beyond a mere test writing mindset)
- Showcase a track record in enzyming preventative features (e.g., regression/resilience guardrails at scale)
- Select and use quality signals (e.g., historical failures, platform beat-voltage metrics) to inform release decisions
- Deliver scalable, distributed testing development for multiple independent teams
- Integrate test gates with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, CircleCI)
- Amplify test signal quality by improving coverage, reliability, and reducing flakiness
- Proficiency with JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Python for buildable quality tooling
- Hands-on experience testing web and mobile applications (iOS/Android ecosystems)
- Demonstrated analytical rigor to diagnose issues across test, code, and environments
- Capacity to communicate via technical as well as non-technical stakeholders
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Desirable (Nice-to-Haves)
- Enhanced practices in platform-level quality automation (guardrails, release policies across silos)
- Feeding into post-flaky-test remedial efforts and end-to-end revamping strategies
- Critical zero-risk telescoping understanding with state-of-the-art testing in production (Acc identifies feature flags, feature flag rollback scenarios)
- Observability practices (Splunk, Grafana) and appreciation of sigma usage as a risk signal
- Coaching-player mindset, guiding teams while remaining non-hierarchical
- Dashboards/automated reporting systems custom-built to drive actionable quality insights, not just simple coverage/progress metrets/trends
- Command-line history over cloud-based testing platforms (Sauce Labs, AWS Device Farm, etc.)
What’s in it for you?
The perks (always improving)
Key benefits (varies internationally but aimed at industry-best standards):
- Generous annual leave
- Medical and health cover
- Inclusive parental leave policies
- Subsidised gym memberships
- Opportunities to give back (pro-bono or community-contribution initiatives)
Flexible Work Arrangement
We’ve rolled out a hybrid model (typically 50% remote / 50% onsite, ranging from 2-3 onsite days/week).
We are open to querying custom flexible arrangements—simply let us know your preferences.
Accessibility
Valuable 500 signatory, disability confident employer:
Please notify us if you require accbesarations during the application or interview process. Reach out to talent@ft.com for tailored support.
Additional Context
At The Financial Times, we uphold principles of ethical integrity in all processes, including use of AI. Whilst candidates are encouraged to use AI tooling during applications, we insist that all submitted information be authentic and represent you truthfully.
For a transparent, fair hiring process, AI monitoring may take place throughout stages. Your authenticity remains paramount.
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