Financial Times
Software Engineer in Test Automation
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Software Engineer in Test Automation
Software Engineer in Test Automation
[Mobile Apps Team] — A Financial Times Role
About the FT
The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, renowned for its authority, integrity and accuracy across global audiences.
Our Product & Tech teams drive innovation in our digital products, served by over one million daily digital subscribers. We thrive on curiosity, ambitious thinking, and diverse problem-solvers—no matter your background.
With a supportive culture, entrepreneurial mindset, and flexible career growth, we remove barriers to ensure everyone can reach their full potential. Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion means we amplify voices of all kinds.
Join us to build a career as newsworthy as our work.
The Role
We seek a Software Engineer in Test Automation to design and maintain scalable, high-confidence quality systems for the FT’s digital frontiers. You’ll join the Mobile Apps team, a cross-functional group delivering world-class news experiences, and partner closely with engineers, product managers, analysts, and QA teams.
Your mission? Build automated guardrails that ensure consistent quality—from web to mobile—while empowering us to shrink feedback loops and accelerate reliable delivery.
Responsibilities
Test Automation, Tooling & Quality Systems
- Design and maintain modular, resilient automated test frameworks using Selenium, Cypress, Appium, or Playwright.
- Integrate tests into CI/CD pipelines to enable scalable, data-backed releases.
- Optimise test suites for speed, stability and clarity of failure (SLIs/SLOs).
- Manage distributed and parallel test environments (e.g., Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, AWS Device Farm).
Test Strategy & Quality Practices
- Map test coverage to system architecture and user stories, ensuring efficient risk mitigation.
- Develop functional, regression, smoke, and integration test strategies.
- Foster a shift-left culture, embedding quality improvements early.
- Design scalable test data strategies with approaches like mocking and deterministic workflows.
- Prioritise risk over coverage; make pragmatic tradeoffs for speed and team autonomy.
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Monitoring, Troubleshooting & Collaboration
- Root-cause diagnose flakey tests, false positives, and pipeline failures.
- Never rely on QA as a bottleneck—empower teams via self-service quality metrics.
- Champion best practices with teams both internally and via community contributions.
- Cast a critical eye on test signals: Fix inefficiencies in platform health monitoring, dashboarding, and reporting.
Requirements
Essential
✅ Proven expertise in designing test strategies beyond script writing (unit, integration, E2E, tradeoffs).
✅ Hands-on experience with automated guardrails and CD guardbanding (e.g. branch protection, flakiness reduction).
✅ Ability to define and interpret quality signals (test results, failure trends, performance metrics) to inform release decisions.
✅ Experience disrupting silos by enabling multiple teams to deliver independent high-quality software.
✅ Knowledge of automated gating in pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins) and code suicide prevention.
✅ Strong foundations in development (JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Python) and devops accountability.
✅ Six+ months transistors? Hands-on iOS/Android automation and logic testing for mobile-web interop.
✅ Mastery of debugging across code, test failures, and environment disparity.
✅ Exceptional listen talk-build ethos—no rigid constraints on language or approach, just collaboration.
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Desirable
🔹 Experience leading platform-level quality frameworks (e.g. coordinators, alerting, prioritization dashboards).
🔹 Championing production design patterns (canary rollouts, feature flags, rollback).
🔹 Exposing hidden insights via beyond-passes syntheses (e.g. performance+teardown percentages, trend-tracking).
🔹 Expertise in observability tools (Splunk, Grafana) leveraging data for Anomaly detection and user journey mapping.
🔹 Experience coaching cross-functional teams in quality flows, with minimal hierarchy dependency.
🔹 Influence without authority or approval chains—empowerment at the center.
Why Join the Financial Times?
Benefits
✔ Flexible working—50% hybrid by default, adaptable patterns where possible. ✔ Generous perks: Competitive parental leave, base pay, bonus schemes, healthcare, gym discounts, and give-back options. ✔ Career growth in a fast-changing media world—your ideas could change how readers engage with video, data, or global viewpoints.
✔ Career potential: Salaries are competitive, and we provide meaningful roles at all levels.
Inclusivity
We’re proud signatories of Valuable 500 and a Disability Confident employer—accessibility is built into process.
If you need adjustments for interviews, tech stack accomanodations, or time zone logistics, let talent@ft.com assist with tailored guidance.
Disclaimer
We embrace AI as you might use it, but the whole process must remain your genuine voice. If your contributions present not just the right words but real evidence of skills, we’ll want to meet you.
“The FT is more than a publication and this role is more than a job.” Join us today.
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