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

5-8 Years Experience

Salary: £45,000 - £55,000 based on skills & experience

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.

• 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, Rest Assured 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, Test Rail).
• 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.

• 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 to focus test effort where defect impact and likelihood are highest.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Coordinate or execute performance, load, resilience, security and accessibility testing appropriate to the product's risk profile.
• Flag non‑functional…