The role
You will work as part of a product engineering team to make sure quality is built into delivery from the start. We are not looking for somebody whose job begins when development finishes. You will be involved in refinement, challenge acceptance criteria, identify risk early and combine strong exploratory testing with useful automation.
We still have manual testing in the estate, but the direction is clear: more Playwright automation, stronger API and integration testing, better CI/CD quality gates and faster feedback. The aim is not to automate everything. It is to automate the repeatable checks that give us confidence and use skilled manual testing where judgement adds more value.
The estate you are joining
You will test across both modern and legacy applications. That includes newer .NET, React/TypeScript and API-based services, but also older VB.NET/.NET Framework applications, ASP.NET Web Forms and workflows where a lot of the behaviour is driven by SQL Server and stored procedures.
That mix matters to how we approach quality. We cannot rely only on browser automation against modern applications. You will need to understand end-to-end behaviour across UI, APIs, integrations and the database, while helping us steadily increase Playwright coverage and move more quality checks into CI/CD as the estate modernises.
What you will be responsible for
Quality and test design
- Review user stories, acceptance criteria and designs before development starts and identify gaps, edge cases and quality risks.
- Create proportionate test approaches covering functional, integration, regression, exploratory and non-functional testing.
- Prepare and manage test data and make sure scenarios reflect realistic business behaviour.
- Raise clear, reproducible defects with enough evidence for engineers to diagnose them quickly.
- Test throughout the SDLC rather than acting as a final gate immediately before release.
- Use risk to decide where deeper testing is needed rather than applying the same test effort to every change.
Automation
- Build and maintain automated tests for web applications, APIs and critical user journeys.
- Use Playwright as the main direction for browser automation, using C# and/or TypeScript as appropriate.
- Integrate automated tests into Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines and help define meaningful quality gates.
- Keep automated tests reliable and maintainable; remove or improve tests that create noise without useful confidence.
- Work with engineers to improve application testability and move checks earlier in the lifecycle.
- Help establish sensible automation patterns that can be reused across products rather than creating a separate framework for every application.
API, data and non-functional testing
- Test REST APIs, integrations and service behaviour using appropriate tools and automation.
- Use SQL Server and T-SQL to validate application behaviour, test data and downstream outcomes.
- Carry out or support load, performance, resilience and compatibility testing where risk warrants it.
- Include accessibility, security and supportability considerations in test thinking rather than leaving them until the end.
- Validate integrations across APIs, files, queues/messages and database boundaries where a user journey spans multiple systems.
Team contribution
- Work closely with Product and Engineering during refinement, development and release.
- Help improve Definition of Ready, Definition of Done and acceptance-criteria quality.
- Give the team a clear view of release risk rather than a simple pass/fail answer.
- Share testing knowledge and help engineers take more ownership of quality.
- Use escaped defects and production incidents to improve automated coverage and the team's engineering practices.
Technology and practices you will work with now
- Playwright as the main direction for browser automation.
- C# and/or TypeScript for automated testing.
- REST API and integration testing.
- SQL Server and T-SQL for data validation and investigation, including workflows driven by stored procedures and database logic.
- Azure DevOps for work management, source control and CI/CD.
- Manual exploratory, regression and acceptance testing where it adds value.
- Load and performance testing tools and techniques where appropriate.
- Existing Selenium, MSTest and tests around older .NET Framework/Web Forms applications may still need to be understood and maintained during transition.
Where we are heading
- Playwright-based automated regression coverage for the most important products and journeys.
- Automated tests running as part of CI/CD rather than as a separate afterthought.
- Clear quality gates, faster feedback and fewer late-cycle surprises.
- More API, integration and data-level testing alongside UI testing.
- Better performance, accessibility, security and resilience checks where the risk justifies them.
- A quality-engineering model where QA specialists coach and enable the whole team rather than owning quality alone.
- Better use of production incidents, telemetry and escaped defects to decide what we automate next.
What we are looking for
- Commercial experience in software testing or quality engineering across the full SDLC.
- Strong exploratory, functional, integration and regression testing skills.
- Experience with test automation. Playwright is preferred, but strong automation experience with another modern framework is transferable.
- API testing experience and enough SQL to investigate and validate data confidently.
- An understanding of CI/CD and how automated tests should fit into delivery pipelines.
- Good analytical thinking, attention to detail and communication.
- Comfortable challenging unclear requirements constructively rather than testing exactly what is written and nothing more.
Useful experience, but not essential
- Performance/load testing and resilience testing.
- Accessibility testing and common web accessibility standards.
- Security testing concepts and working with DevSecOps pipelines.
- Selenium/MSTest or migration from older automation frameworks.
- ISTQB. It is useful, but practical quality-engineering capability matters more than the certificate.
How success looks
The team finds problems earlier, releases with more confidence and spends less time repeating the same manual regression checks. Automation is useful and trusted, defects are well explained, and quality becomes something the whole team owns rather than something handed to QA at the end.
