Principal QA Engineer

Our Team: How we enrich everyday life
You’ll be joining our Digital Quality Assurance team, part of Technology Advisory within Bauer Media Group. We sit at the heart of Bauer’s digital platforms, supporting Rayo – our unified audio and radio experience across web, mobile, smart speakers and backend services. We’re a collaborative, friendly, remote-first engineering team that believes in high standards, strong principles and continuous improvement. We work closely with backend platform engineers, frontend teams, product managers and architecture to ensure quality is built in from day one and not tested in at the end. Our culture is flat, inclusive, and people-first. We value curiosity, healthy debate, mentoring, and shared ownership, alongside having fun together (whether that’s Music Fridays, team workshops, or after work social gatherings when we’re together in person).

The difference you will make
This is a new principal role created to raise the bar for backend quality across our platform. You’ll play a critical role in driving a shift-left quality culture, embedding testability, resilience and contract integrity directly into how our systems are designed and built. Acting as a technical authority, you’ll partner with backend engineers, product managers, SRE/DevOps, and architects to ensure our platform can evolve safely at scale, handling millions of requests while remaining reliable and future-proof. Your impact will be felt not just through automated tests but through architectural influence, better design decisions, faster feedback, and a more confident engineering organisation.

Your role
You’ll be the Principal QA Engineer for our backend platform, owning quality strategy across APIs, services and cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities include:
• Drive and lead architectural design reviews by partnering with developers and PMs during Epic breakdown to embed Testability by Design.
• Lead the strategy for Contract Driven Testing, ensuring services can evolve independently without breaking dependencies.
• Advocate for and enforce Schema-First development, treating OpenAPI/Swagger specifications as the source of truth and validating them automatically.
• Design and maintain a multi-layered automation strategy with a focus on API and service-level testing, and targeted E2E validation using Playwright/TypeScript.
• Partner closely with developers to mature BDD practices within our Agile workflows.
• Embed automated regression suites and quality gates directly into CI/CD pipelines, enabling developers to test continuously.
• Own load and performance testing strategies to ensure backend resilience under high traffic and support other teams (Web, Mobile) where needed.
• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps to integrate observability (logging, tracing, metrics) into the quality strategy using tools such as OpenTelemetry or Datadog.
• Leverage AI coding assistants to accelerate boilerplate and test generation, while retaining ownership of architecture, logic, and code quality.
• Formalise QA practices and mentor engineers across the organisation on modern, AI-assisted, automation-first testing.

The skills you will bring
Required:
• Proven experience in a highly technical QA Automation or Backend Engineering role operating in a shift-left environment.
• Deep understanding of RESTful architectures, with experience validating JSON Schemas or GraphQL types at the contract level.
• Proficiency in Golang or another object-oriented language with the ability to ramp up quickly on Go.
• Experience testing asynchronous and event-driven architectures (. Kafka, SQS), with knowledge of data consistency and resilience patterns.
• Strong experience working within Agile/Scrum, participating in sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives.
• Demonstrated expertise in using AI tooling effectively, with the engineering depth to critique, debug, and refine AI-generated code whilst coaching others to do the same.
• Strong track record testing complex APIs, backend architectures, and cloud-hosted environments (AWS).
• Proven ability to build, maintain, and troubleshoot automated testing within CI/CD pipelines, in collaboration with DevOps teams.
• A team-first mindset with excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Desired:
• Experience running load testing with k6.
• Experience transitioning teams toward an AI and automation-first quality model.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

Working Pattern/Location
This is a full-time, permanent, remote-first role within the UK with occasional in-person collaboration (approximately 8 times per year) either in our Manchester or London offices. We welcome applications from across the UK, ideally residing within or nearby those cities. We value flexibility, trust and balance, and focus on outcomes rather than where you work from.