The difference you will make

This is a new principal role created to raise the bar for backend quality across our platform. You’ll play a critical role in driving a shift-left quality culture, embedding testability, resilience and contract integrity directly into how our systems are designed and built. Acting as a technical authority, you’ll partner with backend engineers, product managers, SRE/DevOps, and architects to ensure our platform can evolve safely at scale, handling millions of requests while remaining reliable and future-proof. Your impact will be felt not just through automated tests but through architectural influence, better design decisions, faster feedback, and a more confident engineering organisation.

Your role

You’ll be the Principal QA Engineer for our backend platform, owning quality strategy across APIs, services and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities include:

• Drive and lead architectural design reviews by partnering with developers and PMs during Epic breakdown to embed Testability by Design.

• Lead the strategy for Contract Driven Testing, ensuring services can evolve independently without breaking dependencies.

• Advocate for and enforce Schema-First development, treating OpenAPI/Swagger specifications as the source of truth and validating them automatically.

• Design and maintain a multi-layered automation strategy with a focus on API and service-level testing, and targeted E2E validation using Playwright/TypeScript.

• Partner closely with developers to mature BDD practices within our Agile workflows.

• Embed automated regression suites and quality gates directly into CI/CD pipelines, enabling developers to test continuously.

• Own load and performance testing strategies to ensure backend resilience under high traffic and support other teams (Web, Mobile) where needed.

• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps to integrate observability (logging, tracing, metrics) into the quality strategy using tools such as OpenTelemetry or Datadog.

• Leverage AI coding assistants to accelerate boilerplate and test generation, while retaining ownership of architecture, logic, and code quality.

• Formalise QA practices and mentor engineers across the organisation on modern, AI-assisted, automation-first testing.

The skills you will bring

Required:

• Proven experience in a highly technical QA Automation or Backend Engineering role operating in a shift-left environment.

• Deep understanding of RESTful architectures, with experience validating JSON Schemas or GraphQL types at the contract level.

• Proficiency in Golang or another object-oriented language with the ability to ramp up quickly on Go.

• Experience testing asynchronous and event-driven architectures (e.g. Kafka, SQS), with knowledge of data consistency and resilience patterns.

• Strong experience working within Agile/Scrum, participating in sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives.

• Demonstrated expertise in using AI tooling effectively, with the engineering depth to critique, debug, and refine AI-generated code whilst coaching others to do the same.

• Strong track record testing complex APIs, backend architectures, and cloud-hosted environments (AWS).

• Proven ability to build, maintain, and troubleshoot automated testing within CI/CD pipelines, in collaboration with DevOps teams.

• A team-first mindset with excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.