Overview

Location: London (hybrid)

Salary: Up to £100,000 + 10% bonus

We’re looking for an experienced Lead SDET to join our growing Quality Engineering practice. This is an exciting opportunity to lead automation strategy, mentor engineers, and drive a Shift-Left testing culture that ensures quality is embedded from the start of the development lifecycle.

If you have a passion for building robust test frameworks, working across multiple technologies, and helping teams deliver high-quality software at pace, this role is for you.

What you’ll be doing

• Take the lead in establishing and evolving automation frameworks (unit, integration, UI, end-to-end).
• Drive early testing practices (Shift-Left) across the lifecycle, ensuring faster detection and resolution of issues.
• Mentor and upskill engineers in the latest testing tools and methodologies.
• Champion a quality-first mindset, setting and tracking meaningful metrics (defect density, pass rates, MTTR).
• Collaborate closely with developers, product owners, and architects to ensure effective test coverage.
• Provide test assurance of user stories using BDD/ATDD practices.
• Manage and lead code review processes, ensuring high-quality contributions across the team.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, enabling rapid and reliable releases.
• Support non-functional testing areas such as performance, accessibility, compatibility, and security.
• Proactively contribute to team retrospectives, planning sessions, and continuous improvement.

What you’ll bring

• Strong background in building automation frameworks from scratch using object-oriented and scripting languages.
• Hands-on experience with OOP principles and applying them in real-world frameworks.
• Expertise with Selenium and exposure to modern tools like Cypress, Playwright, WebdriverIO.
• Experience with BDD frameworks (Cucumber, SpecFlow).
• Strong Web UI and API/microservices testing skills.
• Familiarity with Git workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud-based environments (AWS/Azure).
• Knowledge of non-functional testing approaches.
• Experience mentoring, leading reviews, and guiding quality engineering best practices.

Nice to have

• Experience with contract testing (PACT preferred).
• Knowledge of CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure DevOps).
• Exposure to mobile automation.
• Experience setting up end-to-end testing frameworks across the full SDLC.
• Cloud expertise, particularly AWS.
• Be a technical leader shaping test strategy and engineering best practices.
• Work with modern frameworks, tools, and cloud platforms.
• Collaborate in an agile, supportive environment that values innovation and learning.
• Hybrid working with flexibility to balance work and life.
• Opportunity to influence projects at scale and mentor the next generation of engineers.

If you’re ready to take on a lead role in test automation and engineering excellence, apply today and help us raise the bar for quality.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

• Information Technology

Industries

• IT Services and IT Consulting

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