Software Development Engineer in Test (QA Engineer)

Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

Location: Manchester, Exchange Quays
Working pattern: Hybrid- 2 days on site

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) to join a growing technology team and take ownership of test automation across a suite of cloud-based AI products.

This is a hands-on engineering role rather than a traditional manual QA position. You will design, build and evolve automation frameworks while working closely with software engineers, Product and BA teams to improve the quality and reliability of our products.

Our technology combines modern web applications, APIs, databases, data pipelines, analytics dashboards and machine-learning technology. You will have the opportunity to investigate issues across the full technology stack, from the user interface through to the underlying data and application code.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain robust UI and API automation frameworks using TypeScript and Playwright.

• Build and maintain automated tests using Cucumber/Gherkin and BDD principles.

• Develop scalable and maintainable automation using Page Object Model or similar frameworks.

• Maintain and expand a large automated regression suite.

• Run automated tests in parallel while maintaining reliable test data, isolation and execution.

• Investigate and resolve flaky or unreliable automated tests.

• Investigate defects across the full technology stack and identify the true root cause.

• Use browser developer tools to investigate network requests, console errors, DOM behaviour, cookies and client/server interactions.

• Validate REST APIs and request/response payloads.

• Use SQL to investigate data issues and reconcile UI and API results against underlying database data.

• Investigate data pipelines, ETL processes and dashboard calculations where required.

• Read and understand application source code to support technical investigations.

• Work with Git, pull requests, code reviews and CI/CD pipelines as part of the wider engineering team.

• Identify opportunities to improve automation and prevent recurring defects.

• Provide clear, evidence-based technical findings to developers and stakeholders.

• Contribute to maintaining technical documentation and QA knowledge across the team.

About You You will be an engineering-focused QA professional with strong commercial experience in SDET or QA Automation roles.