Senior QA Engineer

Role: Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

Team: Web Development

Location: Remote first; with fortnightly to monthly face-to-face in Gloucester.

Tech: Blazor, C#, Azure, ADO, HTML, CSS. Moq, NUnit, bUnit, Automapper, Playwright, Jmeter.

As one of the largest insurance groups in the world and the fifth largest employee-owned business in the UK, we manage premiums on behalf of millions of clients across a wide range of product offerings and our development team work on solutions that innovate and put the user's needs at the forefront.

Role

As a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at Howden, you will join one of our agile teams. You will harness the capabilities of Microsoft Azure, Blazor, C# and Playwright to develop and test our front-end applications to create scalable, high-performing, and user-friendly solutions that are secure and reliable.

You will participate in regular agile sessions, collaborating closely with your team to deliver our roadmap whilst developing our automated test capability. You will influence and encourage a quality is everyone's responsibility mindset and shift-left approach. Our environment promotes cross-team learning and collaboration, ensuring you have opportunities to share knowledge and grow alongside your peers.

As a senior you will be comfortable and committed to coaching and mentoring less experienced colleagues to help them progress towards senior. You will help drive up standards and quality as well as maximising throughput of the team through a robust CI/CD mindset. You will also work with other seniors to take lead roles on architectural and technical designs and present these as part of team refinement.

About you:

• A keen understanding of the broader technological landscape.
• You will have a strong understanding of the test pyramid and a myriad of testing techniques (Smoke, white-box, performance, exploratory etc).
• You will have demonstrable experience working with C#, Blazor or other front-end technologies and how best to test them.
• You are comfortable working closely with software engineers.
• You will understand and promote the need for automation but will not necessarily be required to code - Quality is a team responsibility.
• A keen eye for detail and a focus on putting users first.
• A defensive mindset when consuming APIs and sanitising user inputs.
• A strong understanding and experience in testing accessibility needs and relevant standards.
• Familiarity with Test-driven Development and a strong commitment to high quality, maintainable and easy to understand code.
• You have had exposure to cloud technologies (preferably Azure)
• A strong communicator and facilitator.
• A demonstrable risk-based approach to testing.
• An experimental and scientific mindset leading to data-led decision making.
• An understanding of agile development methodologies
• Genuinely believes in the value of continuous delivery practices and iterative development based on feedback.
• Actively engage and participate in all agile sessions.
• Ability to demonstrate working software to a mixture of technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience coaching and mentoring less experienced colleagues.
• Working with the leadership team on identifying training needs within your team.
• Working with our product owners in refining, designing and architecting solutions in keeping with, or challenging, existing patterns and technologies.
• Spots and remediates risks in the SDLC.
• Familiarity with architectural decision records.
• Strong documentation skills in generating acceptance criteria, test plans, and test cases etc.

Rewards:

We believe that great work and dedication should be rewarded, that's why we offer:

• 25 days holiday (plus bank holidays), pro-rated for part year service

• A set of core benefits, designed with your health and financial protection in mind:

• Life Assurance up to 4x salary, protecting your loved ones in case the worst should happen

• Income protection, guaranteeing an income for up to 5 years in the event of an illness or injury

• Contributory pension scheme - 4% employer contribution and 5% employee contribution, rising to 5% & 5% in April 2025

• Access to a Healthcare Cashplan, which gives you access to a variety of health related benefits

• Access to a host of lifestyle and financial benefits that you can choose from:

• Discounts on gym membership across the UK

• Salary sacrifice schemes - Travel Insurance, Cycle to Work, Car leasing, Technology purchase

• Access to discounted personal health policies - Critical illness, private medical, dental plans

• A range of insurance products available commission free, including home, motor, travel and specialist vehicles

• Access to hundreds of high-street retailer discounts

• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) to support employees outside of work