Senior SDET

AT A GLANCE

• Senior SDET / QA Automation Engineer role in a fast-moving product engineering team
• Playwright, Cypress or similar contract testing experience a strong advantage
• Hybrid working with flexibility
• Salary up to £65,000 depending on experience
• Genuine ownership of quality strategy, not just execution

ABOUT THE COMPANY

Our client is a growing technology business with a product engineering team that ships regularly and takes quality seriously. They have reached the point where quality needs to be owned independently of development, and they are making that investment now. This is a new and strategically important hire, with real scope for the right person to shape how quality is done across the organisation as the team continues to scale.

THE ROLE

This is not a manual testing role and it is not a tick-box QA function. Our client needs an SDET who can define the testing strategy, build and own the automation frameworks, and embed quality thinking into the engineering process from refinement through to release. You will work closely with developers, sitting alongside the engineering team in sprints and advocating for quality at every stage.

The role has clear growth potential: as the engineering team scales, the expectation is that this hire grows with it, potentially into a Lead or Head of QA function.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Define and own the end-to-end testing strategy across the product estate
• Build, maintain, and continuously improve automation frameworks covering UI, API, and contract testing
• Integrate automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines for fast, reliable feedback
• Lead contract testing implementation between services and databases to prevent integration regressions
• Design and execute performance and load testing to validate behaviour under scale
• Review developer-written unit and integration tests and raise the standard across the team
• Participate in sprint ceremonies, surfacing quality risks and requirement ambiguities before development begins
• Champion proactive defect finding finding issues before they reach production, not after

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

Essential

• 4+ years of experience in QA automation or SDET roles
• Proficiency with at least one major automation framework (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar)
• Solid API testing skills (Postman, Newman, REST or GraphQL)
• Experience with contract testing (Pact or similar)
• Familiarity with CI/CD integration for automated tests (Git Hub Actions, Jenkins, Azure Dev Ops or similar)
• Developer-adjacent mindset comfortable reading and contributing to code
• Right to work in the UK or Republic of Ireland

Nice to have

• Performance and load testing experience (K6, jMeter or similar)
• Experience working in a startup or scale-up environment

WHY APPLY?

• Salary up to £65,000 depending on experience
• Hybrid working model with flexibility
• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Private health and pension benefits
• Real ownership of quality strategy, not just execution of someone else's plan
• Clear progression pathway to Lead or Head of QA as the team scales

APPLY

Get in touch with Ryan Quinn at Ocho People on Linked In or send in your most recent CV via the link below.

Skills:
Test automation SDET Backend testing

Benefits:
Annual Bonus / 13th Cheque Flexitime