Senior QA Engineer (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds and London)

Are you a Senior QA Engineer passionate about solving complex quality assurance challenges using test automation throughout the SDLC, and across all levels of the test pyramid?

Then join our exciting new Test Enablement team, formed to address organisation wide testing challenges, where you will bring demonstrable, and hands-on experience to partner with product teams, driving meaningful, measurable improvements in quality assurance and testing.

This is where you will build reusable testing tools and automation, make and influence strategic tooling choices, establish quality assurance Golden Paths, and play a leading role in maturing testing practices across the organisation.

You always take a big picture view of the challenges that come with testing complex, distributed applications in a regulated environment, and use your proven experience to improve the reliability and speed of software delivery through accelerated and optimised testing.

In this role, you’ll partner closely with engineers in product squads to test, evolve and scale common solutions. Drawing on a strong analytical mindset, decisions are driven by data and evidence, ensuring well-reasoned outcomes.

Your confidence and credibility will be key when engaging with subject matter experts and engineering leadership, using your experience to influence key outcomes. Your curiosity and active listening help uncover root causes of testing challenges, while constructively challenging assumptions ensures you consistently champion best practice across teams.

Keeping pace with developments in testing tools and techniques, you focus on continuous improvement and bringing practical, actionable innovation into the organisation. Engaging with a broad range of stakeholders, you translate organisational needs into clear insights and initiatives that really strengthen QA and testing practices.

Everyday responsibilities include:

• Work with the Test Enablement team to identify areas of greatest need where senior expertise can have the most impact

• Collaborate with QA engineers in product squads to raise the bar in testing maturity and effectiveness

• Evaluate different approaches to testing challenges, clearly articulating trade-offs, strengths and limitations

• Create templates, tools and Golden Paths that capture proven best practice for use across the organisation

• Act as a trusted mentor, coach and technical authority within the team and wider engineering community

• Lead and influence key decisions in a collaborative and inclusive environment

• Advocate for modern, effective quality assurance practices that improve release speed, confidence and reliability

Essential skills and experience:

• Strong, demonstrable experience with Python

• Strong, demonstrable experience with Java

• Selenium WebDriver

• Unit test frameworks such as Pytest

• API testing using tools such as REST Assured and Postman

• BDD frameworks such as Cucumber, Pytest bdd or Behave

• Agile testing practices

• CI/CD tooling including GitLab and Jenkins

• Load and performance testing using tools such as JMeter or Locust

• Proven experience in test process improvement and test strategy ownership

Desirable skills and experience:

• Other UI testing tools such as Playwright or Cypress

• Contract testing using tools such as PACT

• Mock APIs using WireMock

• Browser compatibility tools such as BrowserStack

• Test management tools such as Jira Xray

• Accessibility testing tools such as Axe core

• Security testing tools such as Snyk or OWASP Zap

• AWS

• Experience working in a regulated environment

This is a role for a hand-on senior QA professional ready to lead, mentor, and drive meaningful improvements in QA engineering across complex, distributed systems.

Only relevant work experience in Senior QA, and both Java and Python is required - no specific qualifications needed

Salary From: £55,500
Closing Date: Sunday 15th February at 23:00 (UK time)

Being an integral part of such a meaningful mission is extremely rewarding in itself, but in order to support our people, we’re continually improving our benefits package. We pride ourselves on investing in our people and supporting them to achieve their career goals, as well as offering a benefits package including: 

• Generous Leave:  30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, plus additional leave for long service, and also the option to apply for up to 30 days of remote working abroad annually (approval required).
• Family-Friendly: Blended working arrangements, flexible working, enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave benefits.
• Pension & Financial: Defined contribution pension (Genomics England double-matches up to 10%, however you can contribute more if you wish), Life Assurance (3x salary), and a Give As You Earn scheme.
• Learning & Development: Individual learning budgets, support for training and certifications, and reimbursement for one annual professional subscription (approval required).
• Recognition & Rewards: Employee recognition programme and referral scheme.
• Health & Wellbeing: Subsidised gym membership, a free Headspace account, and access to an Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, flu jabs.

Equal opportunities and our commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace 

Genomics England is actively committed to providing and supporting an inclusive environment that promotes equity, diversity and inclusion best practice both within our community and in any other area where we have influence. We are proud of our diverse community where everyone can come to work and feel welcomed and treated with respect regardless of any disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, or social background. 

Genomics England’s policies of non-discrimination and equity and will be applied fairly to all people, regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, being pregnant or recently becoming a parent, race, religion or beliefs, sex or sexual orientation, length of service, whether full or part-time or employed under a permanent or a fixed-term contract or any other relevant factor.  

Genomics England does not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment, victimisation or bullying at work. Such behaviour undermines our mission and core values and diminishes the dignity, respect and integrity of all parties. Our People policies outline our commitment to inclusivity. 

We aim to remove barriers in our recruitment processes and to be flexible with our interview processes. Should you require any adjustments that may help you to fully participate in the recruitment process, we encourage you to discuss this with us. 

Culture

We have four key behaviours that represent what we would like Genomics England to feel like and the culture we want to encourage, in order for us to achieve our mission. These behaviours help us all work well together, deliver on our outcomes, celebrate our successes and share feedback with each other. You can read about these and other aspects of our culture here Culture | Genomics England

Blended working model

Genomics England operates a blended working model as we know our people appreciate the flexibility that hybrid working can bring. We expect most people to come into the office a minimum of 2 times each month. However, this will vary according to role and will be agreed with your team leader. There is no expectation that people will return to the office full time unless they want to, however, some of our roles require full time on site attendance e.g., lab teams, reception team. 

Our teams and squads have, and will continue to reflect on what works best for them to work together successfully and have the freedom to design working patterns to suit, beyond the minimum. Our office locations are: Canary Wharf, Cambridge and Leeds.

Onboarding background checks

As part of our recruitment process, all successful candidates are subject to a Standard Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check.  We therefore require applicants to disclose any previous offences at point of application, as some unspent convictions may mean we are unable to proceed with your application due to the nature of our work in healthcare.