Automation QA Engineer; Embedded Software

We’re looking for an experienced QA Automation Engineer (Embedded Software) to join our Player Cluster and help us build a world class hardware automation suite to keep our quality up in the face of massive growth.

Yoto is a screen‑free interactive audio platform for kids. We make carefully connected audio players that kids control, with no microphones, cameras or ads. We have a catalogue of audio that inspires creative play and learning with 1,000+ titles in our card store from top creators, publishers and labels – think Disney, Marvel, Roald Dahl and Universal Music. We also create Yoto Originals like Brain Bots.

• Voted the 14th fastest‑growing private software technology company in Britain in The Sunday Times 100 Tech 2025; and named the 94th fastest‑growing company in Europe in the prestigious FT1000.
• Ranked 9th in Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in 2024; and featured in the Sifted 100 fastest‑growing startups across the UK&I by revenue growth.
• Featured in Bloomberg’s 25 UK startups to watch in 2023; and ranked second fastest growing tech company in the UK in the Deloitte Fast
  50.
• Named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Inventions of 2020.
• We’re over 200 employees spread across the world… and growing!

This position fits into our “player cluster” at Yoto, the cluster is made up of a number of cross‑functional teams including Software, Embedded, Mobile, Backend, QA, Product Management & Design, all working on powering our flagship products:
Yoto Player and Yoto Mini. We work in a mature, high‑trust async environment with a lot of independence. Everyone is able to contribute ideas and be part of decisions. The Embedded teams within the cluster tackle a broad range of problems from research of new Yoto products, through development of low‑level HW drivers all the way to interactive audio content “apps” and integration with the Yoto mobile app.

We have loads of exciting plans that you’ll be helping us to build.

• Improving and expanding our automation capabilities for our embedded system team, including but not limited to improvements to the underlying framework, keeping performant CI/CD pipelines, and maintaining a very high release bar
• Contribute to the vision for the QA/Automation goals at the company, helping establish workback plans to achieve them
• Continually assess current and long‑term testing needs for the organization, looking around corners for unknowns and building a defensive strategy and operating plan
• Work closely with stakeholders to translate project requirements and customer issues into tangible test strategies
• Drive forward a “shift left” mentality with engineers for their design, development, and maintenance of tests
• Help build and design a world‑class infrastructure for monitoring and performance testing

• Proven experience with both manual and automated testing
• Solid understanding of testing best practices and methodologies and their appropriate usage
• Experience writing and enhancing automation for an embedded system (PyTest preferred, open to similar but some Python experience is beneficial)
• CI/CD background, specifically with Docker & Jenkins for the build and test pipelines
• Familiarity with IoT/HW protocols and interfaces (e.g. BT/BLE, RFID/NFC, WiFi; SPI, I2S, I2C, Matter, MQTT, etc)
• Familiarity with electronics principles and design
• Familiarity with security best practices

£60,000 - £70,000 based on experience

• Flexibility:
  Hybrid working – expectation of 1 day a week in our London office, but you are welcome to come in more. How you meet the minimum expectation is up to you, to ensure you're happy and productive in your role whilst also getting that vital face time with your colleagues. Take advantage of our ‘work from anywhere’ policy to work from a different location for up to 6 weeks every year.
  
  Summer Hours policy to use between the months of June and August.
• Financial:
  Receive Income Protection, covering long‑term sickness for up to 2 years and company sick pay that increases with length of service. Life Assurance cover from day one of your service. Workplace Pension…