Senior QA Engineer

Senior QA Engineer

📍 Hybrid (3 days in-office / 2 days remote) - London based

💰 £50,000 to £70,000

About the role

We are partnered with a startup looking for a Senior QA Engineer to join their growing engineering team and take ownership of quality across the product. This is a dedicated QA role, so you’ll play a key part in shaping testing practices, defining processes, and embedding quality deeply into our development lifecycle. The product is highly data-driven, with dashboards, reports, and complex business logic. You’ll work closely with developers, product, and design to ensure features are delivered correctly, reliably, and at a high standard - and that issues are caught as early as possible.

This role is both strategic and hands-on: you’ll design and implement automation, perform manual testing when needed, and help the team aggressively reduce our bug backlog and technical debt.

The Business

This is a London-based data intelligence startup operating at the intersection of brand strategy, emerging technology, and digital culture. The company works with some of the world's biggest consumer brands, providing data, insight, and AI-powered tools to help them measure and grow their presence across cutting-edge digital platforms. The team is collaborative by nature, and deeply passionate about the space they operate in.

The Team

The Engineering team plays a critical role developing and refining data platform that helps and empowers clients - from major brands to emerging players in various industries - to navigate the complexities of virtual worlds. The team is extremely collaborative, working together to not only build a great platform, but also a great team.

What you’ll do

• Own and drive the QA strategy across the product
• Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites (frontend, backend, and/or API)
• Perform manual testing where automation isn’t sufficient or appropriate
• Define and improve QA processes that integrate smoothly with our development workflow
• Work closely with product and design to ensure requirements are clearly understood and correctly delivered
• Act as a quality advocate throughout the development lifecycle (from early discovery to release)
• Help prioritise, manage, and reduce a significant bug backlog
• Support the team in identifying and addressing technical debt
• Collaborate daily with developers, DevOps, the solution architect, and engineering leadership
• Continuously improve testing tools, practices, and documentation.

What we’re looking for

• Strong experience as a Senior QA Engineer (or similar role)
• Proven ability to build QA processes from scratch or significantly improve existing ones
• Solid experience with test automation, including hands-on experience with Playwright
• Confidence performing manual testing for complex or exploratory scenarios
• Experience testing data-heavy applications, dashboards, or reporting systems
• Good understanding of modern software development practices and CI/CD
• Comfortable being the first and sole QA hire in a funded startup environment
• Proactive, independent, and able to take ownership without heavy supervision
• Experience working within a web agency or digital agency environment
• Easy-going, collaborative, and a strong team player

Nice to have

• Background in testing analytics, BI, or complex data pipelines
• Experience helping teams reduce long-standing bug or tech-debt backlogs
• Familiarity with agile or iterative development environments