Senior QA Engineer

Senior QA Engineer Perm Birmingham Up to £62,000pa As a Senior QA Engineer, you are the quality owner within your Scrum team. You play a crucial role in ensuring the quality, reliability, and resilience of our systems by driving strong testing practices and acting as the primary voice of quality throughout the software development lifecycle. You are the execution expert within your team—delivering high‑quality test coverage, mentoring peers, improving processes, and enabling engineers to adopt a quality‑first mindset. You collaborate closely with development teams and other stakeholders to deliver consistently high‑quality software in a fast‑paced, agile environment. Key Responsibilities * Test Planning and Execution: Collaborate with the development teams to define test strategies, test plans, and test cases based on project requirements and user stories. Execute test cases and document test results thoroughly. * Test Automation: Design, develop, and maintain automated test scripts to increase testing efficiency and coverage. Collaborate with the Principal QA Engineer to establish and improve the test automation framework. * Defect Management: Identify, report, and track defects, working closely with development teams to ensure timely resolution and retesting. * Continuous Testing: Work with the development teams to integrate automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline, enabling continuous testing and regression testing. * Performance and Load Testing: Conduct performance and load testing to assess system responsiveness, stability, and scalability. * Non-Functional Testing: Participate in non-functional testing activities, such as security, accessibility, and usability testing. * Test Documentation: Create and maintain comprehensive test documentation, including test plans, test cases, and test reports. * Test Environment Management: Collaborate with the development teams to set up and maintain testing environments. * Test Data Management: Ensure the availability of test data and manage test data sets for different testing scenarios. * Mentorship & Quality Leadership: Support, guide, and mentor other QAs, sharing knowledge openly and setting a strong example for quality. * Strategy Collaboration & Execution: Partner with the Principal QA to drive test strategy execution at the team level, ensuring adoption of best practices across tools, frameworks, and processes. Key Requirements Must Have: * Proven experience (typically 6+ years) in software testing, test automation, and quality assurance. * Hands-on experience in test planning, test case design, and test execution. * Strong knowledge of test automation tools and frameworks, such as Selenium, Playwright, JUnit, TestNG, or similar. * Experience with scripting languages, such as Python, Java, or JavaScript, for test automation. * Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated tests into the development workflow. * Ability to coach and mentor QA Engineers. * Strong debugging and analytical skills, with ability to go beyond surface-level failures. Desirable: * Knowledge of performance testing tools, such as JMeter, Gatling, or LoadRunner. * Experience in security testing methodologies and tools. * Understanding of accessibility testing standards and practices