QA Engineer (Product Engineering Team)

Location: Cardiff

Hybrid/Flexible Working

Salary: Up to £45,000 depending on experience, plus a potential bonus of up to £9,000

The Role

You'll join the Engineering team at LDMS as a QA Engineer, working within a team and reporting to an Engineering Team Lead. You'll own the testing approach for the features your team delivers, from requirement review through to production sign-off, and you'll build the automation that keeps that coverage running.

Our stack is React and TypeScript on the frontend, Java with Spring Boot on the backend, and PostgreSQL with schema-per-tenant multi-tenancy underneath, all cloud-hosted on AWS. Test automation is WebdriverIO and Playwright, running in CI.

You'll work within the test strategy and standards set for your team and feed into them where you see a better approach. You'll be trusted to decide how a feature gets tested, to say when something is not ready, and to keep testing moving when the requirements are still unclear. Supporting junior QAs is part of the job.

Key Responsibilities

These may change with the needs of the business, but the main areas are:

Technical Skills

• Design and build automation for your feature areas across UI, API and integration layers with minimal oversight
• Spot testability gaps in technical designs and raise them during planning and design review, before they get expensive to fix
• Build performance tests for key user journeys and interpret the results against a baseline
• Choose the right test approach for the risk in front of you, whether risk-based, exploratory or scripted, and explain the trade-offs
• Keep tests reliable, fast and independent, including the test data they depend on

Delivery

• Plan and own the testing approach for end-to-end feature delivery, managing test scope and raising risks early
• Pull out dependencies and unknowns in acceptance criteria before engineering has started
• Own quality sign-off through to production, then watch defect trends after release and act on regressions
• Give reliable test estimates at story level and flag slippage early rather than late
• Keep testing moving when requirements are ambiguous, while chasing the clarity you need

Impact

• Contribute consistently to your team's quality goals, to the point where release confidence depends on your work
• Help graduate and junior QAs get better through informal mentoring on test design, automation patterns and defect writing
• Raise QA process improvements and follow them through when you take ownership
• Represent the quality view in cross-functional conversations and explain trade-offs to people without a testing background

Communication

• Adapt how you communicate to the audience, with detailed defect analysis for engineers and clear risk summaries for product and stakeholders
• Contribute from a quality angle in design and feature reviews
• Give specific, useful feedback on test coverage and code quality in review
• Raise quality concerns directly and professionally, and never let a known risk go unreported
• Write test documentation other people can pick up and run without coming back to you

AI and Innovation

• Use AI to broaden test design, including boundary values, negative paths and data permutations, and judge which suggestions are real risks and which are noise
• Review AI-generated test code for reliability and maintainability, and reject tests that pass without meaningfully exercising the system
• Follow the team's agreed approach to AI-assisted work, and keep the rules and skills for your test area current as things change
• Take responsibility for what carries your name and what you commit to, whatever helped produce it

Requirements

Essential

• Solid hands-on software testing experience across both manual and automated testing
• Hands-on automation experience with WebdriverIO or Playwright, and comfortable picking up the other
• Experience implementing automated tests using Cucumber or another BDD framework
• Working knowledge of Java or JavaScript/TypeScript, enough to write and maintain test code that others review
• Strong SQL, and comfortable querying relational databases directly
• API testing experience and a sound understanding of request and response cycles
• Comfortable with Git, and with tests running in a CI/CD pipeline (for example Jenkins)
• A track record of owning testing for a feature end to end, including the sign-off decision
• Able to make progress when requirements are incomplete, while chasing the clarity you need
• Clear communicator in writing and in person, with defect reports and risk summaries that people can act on

Desirable

• Performance testing experience, including interpreting results against a baseline
• Non-functional test coverage such as accessibility checks or security scanning
• Experience using AI tools well as part of day-to-day testing
• An understanding of what it takes to build and test software in a financial environment
• Experience with cloud-hosted systems on AWS
• Test data management in a multi-tenant environment
• Experience supporting or mentoring graduate and junior testers