Senior QA / Automation Engineer

Senior QA / Automation Engineer £45,000 - £50,000 | Remote UK | Permanent Are you a QA / Automation Engineer who wants the opportunity to take real ownership rather than simply inherit an established testing process? We are working with a growing sports technology business that operates complex, real-time platforms handling large volumes of live data and significant traffic during major sporting events. They are looking for their first dedicated QA / Automation Engineer to help establish how QA works across the development team. The Role This is a hands-on position combining automation, API, functional and performance testing. You will have the autonomy to identify gaps, recommend tooling and build practical testing processes from the ground up. Rather than being handed existing checklists, you will be expected to understand the systems, identify risks and determine how they should be tested. You will be working across: React / Next.js web applications REST APIs and backend services Real-time data feeds and WebSockets Embedded widgets and customer integrations High-traffic, data-driven applications Betting and gaming products A key focus will be improving confidence around releases and ensuring applications can cope with significant production traffic. What You'll Be Doing * Building automated regression, smoke and API tests * Testing web applications, APIs and integrations * Testing real-time and event-driven functionality * Introducing load, capacity and performance testing * Defining test plans and appropriate coverage * Investigating issues across applications, APIs, logs and data * Working closely with developers to reproduce and resolve defects * Supporting release sign-off and post-release validation * Helping establish the company's overall QA approach * Influencing automation tooling and testing processes What We're Looking For You'll need strong commercial QA experience with good hands-on automation skills. Ideally, you'll have experience with: Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar API testing and automation Postman, Insomnia or equivalent Modern web application testing REST APIs and backend systems Regression and integration testing Creating test plans and test cases Working closely with software development teams Experience with load/performance testing, real-time data, WebSockets, event-driven systems or high-traffic applications would be particularly valuable. The wider technology environment includes React, Next.js, Go, Node.js, Python, PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB and AWS, although you are not expected to have worked with everything in the stack. The Person This role will suit someone proactive and self-sufficient. As the first dedicated QA hire, you need to be comfortable identifying what needs testing rather than waiting for somebody to assign you a list of tasks. You could already be operating at Senior QA level, or you could be a strong mid-level QA / Automation Engineer looking for an opportunity to step up and take greater ownership. Experience within sports technology, betting, gaming, trading, IoT or another real-time environment would be advantageous but isn't essential. What's on Offer? * £45,000 - £50,000 salary * 100% remote working * Permanent, full-time position * Opportunity to become the first dedicated QA hire * Genuine ownership of automation and QA processes * Freedom to influence tooling and testing strategy * Technically challenging real-time and high-traffic systems * Growing business investing heavily in its technology function If you're looking for a QA Automation role where you can have genuine influence and help build the function rather than simply follow an existing process, we'd be interested in speaking with you