Automation QA Engineer

We’re working in one of the most important sectors of the global economy: maritime shipping.

Nearly everyone is affected by goods moving across the seas, whether that’s energy, raw materials, food, or wind turbines. Yet much of the industry is still hampered by manual processes, paperwork, and bureaucracy.

We’re a seven-year-old startup with strong revenue growth, several Fortune 100 customers, and strong VC backing. We’re building software that makes maritime shipping easier, more transparent, and more cost-effective — and we’re looking for a Senior QA Engineer to help us build quality into the way we develop and deliver it.

This is not a role focused only on testing completed tickets. You’ll work throughout the development lifecycle: understanding risk, shaping validation strategies, improving quality practices, owning release confidence, and helping prevent defects before they reach customers.

Responsibilities

- Work closely with developers, product managers, designers, customers, and other stakeholders to understand business behaviour, technical risk, and expected outcomes.
- Define pragmatic test strategies based on risk and determine what needs to be validated before a change is safe to release.
- Design, develop, and maintain automated testing using Playwright with JavaScript/TypeScript, including UI, API, and hybrid workflows where appropriate.
- Perform exploratory and investigative testing of complex product behaviour, integrations, edge cases, and customer-specific configurations.
- Investigate and triage defects, understand root causes and affected areas, assess risk, and verify fixes through to production.
- Help improve both QA and QC practices across the engineering organisation, including how requirements are challenged, risks are identified, and quality is measured.
- Help design and evolve CI/CD gating strategies so that meaningful quality checks protect the delivery pipeline and prevent unsafe changes from progressing.
- Use AI as part of the QA workflow and help develop safe, repeatable AI-assisted QA pipelines for analysis, investigation, test generation, coverage assessment, and validation, with appropriate safeguards.
- Take ownership of release quality and release readiness, bringing together test results, known risks, unresolved defects, dependencies, and production considerations to support clear go/no-go decisions.
- Support releases through deployment and production verification, and help improve the release process based on what we learn from incidents, defects, and customer feedback.

Requirements

- Minimum 5 years of experience in software testing / quality engineering, including experience with automated testing in a B2B SaaS product.
- Experience with Playwright and JavaScript/TypeScript, or equivalent experience with another modern automation framework and the ability to work effectively with Playwright.
- Experience testing beyond the black-box level and investigating behaviour across the product and supporting systems.
- Strong understanding of risk-based testing and risk management — the ability to identify where failures matter most, prioritise validation accordingly, and communicate residual risk clearly.
- Experience with CI/CD, Git, pull-request workflows, and quality gates.
- Practical experience using AI within QA or software engineering workflows, with an understanding of how AI-generated output should be validated and constrained.
- Experience taking ownership of or contributing significantly to release readiness and production validation.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills. You should be comfortable challenging assumptions, explaining risk, asking difficult questions, and communicating clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Strong analytical and investigative skills, with the ability to reason about complex systems rather than simply execute predefined test cases.
- Intellectual curiosity and an interest in understanding maritime shipping and the business problems our customers are trying to solve.
- A desire to work closely with customers, end users, developers, designers, product managers, and other stakeholders rather than treating QA as a separate downstream function.