Senior QA Automation Engineer
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
- Contribute to automation strategy and architecture - Significantly shape the automation approach for complex, cross-cutting areas - designing frameworks, making architectural decisions, and balancing investment against risk and maintainability
- Build and maintain test automation - Create and evolve automated coverage for web, mobile (Android), and APIs, ensuring suites provide trustworthy signals for release decisions
- Solve systemic quality problems - Identify patterns behind flaky tests, slow pipelines, and brittle test data, and drive structural fixes rather than patching symptoms
- Design effective test approaches - Maintain high-value test cases (manual and automated) informed by deep product knowledge, and drive non-functional testing (performance, security, accessibility) where risk warrants it
- Strengthen continuous testing - Optimise CI/CD integration so automated tests provide fast, reliable feedback without becoming a bottleneck
- Shift quality left - Bring a testability perspective to requirements and design discussions, partnering with Engineers, Designers, and Product Managers to catch issues earlier
- Own the defect lifecycle - Identify, document, and track issues in JIRA, support triage, and work with developers to drive root-cause fixes
- Raise the bar across QA - Mentor QA and automation engineers, influence team standards, evaluate new tools and approaches, and foster a culture where automation is treated as production-quality code
- Leverage AI tooling - Use AI-assisted tools (e.g. GitHub Copilot) to accelerate test development and explore AI-driven approaches to test generation and defect detection
- Keep customers at the heart - Develop a deep understanding of clinical workflows and user needs to ensure coverage targets what matters most to care home patients and customers, * Own automation strategy and make architectural decisions that shape how the team tests and delivers
- Work on meaningful problems in the healthcare sector that directly impact patient care
- Grow your automation expertise with modern frameworks and tools
- Mentor QA and automation engineers, helping develop capability across the team
- Evaluate and introduce new tools and approaches - your recommendations will be heard
- Contribute your ideas and experience to improve quality standards
- Work with modern technologies and contribute to technical decisions
- Grow with us as we expand
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or similar
- 5+ years of industry experience in software testing and automation, including experience owning automation strategy for complex areas
- Solid manual testing experience - strong foundation in manual testing and validation
- Web and mobile application testing - strong experience testing web applications and mobile apps (Android)
- API testing experience - solid experience testing RESTful APIs and familiarity with API testing tools (e.g. Bruno, Postman, REST Assured)
- Test scripting - strong experience writing automated test scripts in languages such as Python, JavaScript, or similar
- Test automation frameworks - experience designing, evolving, and making architectural decisions about automation frameworks (e.g. Playwright, Appium, or similar)
- CI/CD pipeline experience - experience optimising automated test integration in CI/CD pipelines for fast, reliable feedback
- Strategic test design - ability to design effective, scalable test strategies and make sound decisions about automation scope and investment
- Systemic problem-solving - ability to identify patterns of recurring reliability or maintainability issues and drive structural improvements, not just patch symptoms
- Test management tools - experience with test management tools for organising test cases, test reporting, and tracking metrics
- Strong troubleshooting skills - excellent debugging abilities for both test automation and defect investigation
- Critical thinking - ability to understand business rules and apply critical thinking to product requirements, design decisions (including UI/UX), and implementation
- Collaborative mindset - excellent communication skills with ability to articulate automation strategy and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences
- Mentoring ability - experience and enthusiasm for developing automation capability in others through pairing, code reviews, and guidance
- Git and version control - confident with Git for collaboration and source control of automation code
- Agile/Scrum methodologies - capable and comfortable working in agile environments
- Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot
Bonus Points For
- Performance and load testing (e.g. Locust, K6, JMeter)
- Security testing (e.g. OWASP, penetration testing)
- Accessibility and usability testing
- Cloud testing platforms (e.g. BrowserStack, LambdaTest)
- Testing serverless architectures (e.g. AWS Lambda functions)
- BDD test definition (e.g. Gherkin) and frameworks (e.g. Cucumber, SpecFlow)
- Test coverage analysis and test analytics
- Test data management strategies and tools
- Using AI to accelerate testing (e.g. generating test cases and data, drafting automation, identifying issues and coverage gaps)
- GitHub and GitHub Actions workflows for CI/CD automation
- Mobile device farms and cloud-based mobile testing solutions
- Testing SQL and NoSQL databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, DynamoDB) including validation, performance, and data integrity testing
- Experience in a regulated domain such as Healthcare or Pharmacy tech
- Security and data handling best practices in automation codebases and test environments
Benefits & conditions
25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays
· Annual leave increases by 1 day for each completed year of service, up to 30 days
· Option to buy up to 5 additional days' annual leave
· Aviva pension scheme with 3% employer contribution and 5% minimum employee contribution, plus a salary sacrifice option
· Private medical insurance through Freedom, with the option to add immediate family members at employee cost
· Employee Assistance Programme through Health Assured, including 24/7 confidential wellbeing support for employees and immediate family
· Electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme
· Cycle to Work scheme, including e-bikes
· Company sick pay of up to 2 weeks' full pay, which may be extended to 6 weeks at management discretion
· Enhanced maternity pay of 3 months' full pay for employees with 52 weeks' continuous service by the Expected Week of Childbirth, with up to 52 weeks' maternity leave in total
· Full pay for up to 2 weeks' paternity leave for employees who meet statutory eligibility requirements
· Paid antenatal and adoption-related appointments, with up to 5 appointments of up to 6.5 hours each
· Car allowance or leased company vehicle for eligible travel-based roles, including a £400 per month car allowance as an alternative to a company vehicle