SDET – QA Automation Engineer

At OakNorth, we’re on a mission to empower the UK’s most ambitious businesses. Since 2015, we’ve lent over $18 billion across the UK and US, helped create more than 58,000 new homes and 36,000 new jobs, and supported hundreds of thousands of personal savers — all while fuelling the UK economy. Team Mission 🚀  We are looking for a hands-on SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) with 4–5 years of experience in automation, primarily in Java, functional testing of front-end applications. The role will cover UI and/or API automation in a dynamiclending/banking domain, built on AWS cloud infrastructure Key Responsibilities

Design, develop, and maintain robust automation frameworks (Java-based) for both UI and

API layers.

Build, execute, and maintain automated regression suites tied into CI/CD pipelines (e.g.,

Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, AWS CodePipeline).

Collaborate with development, product, operations and QA teams from early requirement

and design phases to production release, ensuring quality is built-in (shift-left).

Define test strategies, identify test coverage gaps, ensure test data management,

environment provisioning, and automate test execution in AWS environments (e.g., EC2,

Lambda, containers).

Validate functionality, performance and reliability of lending/banking domain-specific

workflows (e.g., credit decisioning, loan lifecycle, user onboarding, payments, risk).

Monitor, analyse and report test metrics and quality indicators; raise risks, drive

continuous improvement in quality processes.

Stay current with test automation tools, frameworks, best practices, and domain trends

(fintech, lending, banking) and propose improvements.

Required Skills & Experience

4-5 years of professional experience as QA Automation Engineer / SDET with primary

hands-on in Java.

Strong experience in automation of UI (e.g., Selenium WebDriver, Cypress, Playwright) and

API (e.g., RestAssured, Postman, Karate) layers — ideally both.

Solid object-oriented programming skills (Java) and test framework experience (e.g.,

TestNG, JUnit, Cucumber/BDD).

Understanding of the banking/lending domain: loan application flows, credit approval,

underwriting, lifecycle of financial products or banking operations.

Good analytical and problem-solving capabilities; ability to work in fast paced, startup-style

environment.

Excellent communication and collaboration skills across teams and geographies.

Key Attributes

Personal drive (proactive), responsible, and result-oriented.

Flexible, curious, creative thinker with strong problem-solving skills.

Key Attributes

Personal drive (proactive), responsible, and result-oriented.

Flexible, curious, creative thinker with strong problem-solving skills.

Fast learner with the ability to adapt to evolving technologies and frameworks.

Strong team player with excellent collaboration and communication skills.

Domain experience in lending, credit risk, banking channels (digital banking, SME lending,

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline with 4-5

years of work experience