Staff QA Automation Engineer

We're hiring a Staff QA Automation Engineer to help shape how quality engineering works across tem.

QA sits inside Platform, a central team that builds the tooling and standards the rest of engineering runs on. You'll design the frameworks and practices that let them test well themselves, and scale into the future. As we scale, you'll lead and develop scripts that equip engineering teams with the automation and standards to own quality themselves.

The product is built on a microservice architecture that brings real complexity to testing. You'll own the quality engineering approach as the organisation scales — setting the standards, building the tooling, and driving adoption across engineering.

What you'll work on:

• A risk-aware CI testing standard any team can run: a dependency model that drives test selection and breaking-change detection, so most PRs get a fast targeted run with a clear confidence signal at the point of change.

• Unit, integration, and contract testing standards with an observability layer that keeps pipelines honest and not flaky. Proven through reference test suites in real service repos, not a QA-authored checklist.

• The quality side of canary releases: working with the wider Platform team to define automated pass/fail analysis against production traffic so deployments promote or roll back without manual sign-off.

• AI in the quality pipeline: LLM-based change-risk classification, targeted mutation testing, test generation, and self-healing checks. We already use LLM tooling across QA and want someone to take it further.

You report to Bartek Kucharski (QA). Specialist individual contributor, no direct reports.

Requirements

Must haves:

• Expertise in test automation frameworks including pytest, Playwright, Selenium, and API testing or similar.

• Experience architecting and maintaining test automation frameworks and tooling used across a wider engineering organisation.

• Deep knowledge of testing across microservice or distributed systems, including API-level automation, CI/CD integration, and service-level testing strategies.

• Experience leading innovation and PoCs in testing, particularly AI-led regression optimisation and change-risk analysis.

• Strong collaboration and delivery focus across multi-project environments and distributed teams.

• Contract testing or consumer/provider verification (Pact, OpenAPI schema validation, or similar).

• AWS infrastructure experience (Lambda, GitHub Actions self-hosted runners, deployment tooling).

Nice to have:

• Progressive deployment experience: canary releases, feature flags, automated rollback from production signals.

• Mutation testing, whether traditional tooling or LLM-based.

• Test-data management and environment-isolation strategy in shared environments.

• Experience in a regulated or high-stakes domain (energy, fintech, payments).