Senior QA Engineer

Job Purpose

We are hiring a Quality Engineer to be the expert in quality and testing within those teams, building the automation, tooling, and pipelines that let a team release small changes often and be confident in them.

These are hands-on engineering roles. You will write code, build and own systems, and fix problems yourself. You are an engineer whose specialism is quality.

You will be embedded in an engineering team, reporting to its engineering lead or manager, with a dotted line into the Head of Quality Engineering who leads the discipline. Depending on the shape of the codebase, you may work across more than one team.

About Product & Technology

Product & Technology plays a pivotal role in aligning the organization with its strategic objectives and enhancing shareholder value. Product & Technology is responsible for establishing unified standards and governance practices throughout the company. Additionally, we oversee the development and maintenance of core applications essential for the seamless operation of various functions across the organization. We are committed to driving and executing future roadmaps that are in line with the overall strategic direction of RWS. 

With a global reach, Product & Technology provides support services to over 7500 end users worldwide. We take pride in managing the information security operation and safeguarding all our assets. Our core functions encompass Enterprise & Technical Architecture, Network & Voice, Infrastructure, Service Delivery, Service Operations, Data & Analytics, Security & Quality Compliance, Transformation, Application Development, Enterprise Platforms. With a dedicated team of over 500 staff, Product & Technology ensures a strong presence across all regions, enabling efficient and effective support to our global operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Owning the test approach for a product or codebase. Deciding, with the engineering lead, what quality looks like for your area: the strategy, the levels tested, the standards, and where automation pays and where it does not. Making the case with evidence rather than coverage numbers, including to people who will push back.
• Designing and owning the automation frameworks. Not just writing tests but building the thing others write tests in, choosing the tooling, and making the build-or-buy calls.
• Owning performance, load, and resilience for your area. Building the benchmarks, setting the thresholds, interpreting the results, and being the person who says whether a release is safe on that basis. On our larger and on-premises products, this includes the dependency and configuration permutations they support.
• Working across teams. A senior role typically spans several teams or a whole product area, and works with the Head of Quality Engineering and the other Senior Quality Engineers to set practice that the wider organisation adopts.
• Contributing to the product codebase, including the harder testability problems: breaking dependencies, making legacy code reachable by tests, and building the seams that let a product be released more often.
• Leading production quality investigations. Root cause, then the systemic fix, then the evidence that it will not happen again.
• Evaluating and landing AI quality tooling. Assessing what is genuinely useful in a fast-moving space, running the trials, and making the recommendation. We expect the tooling recommendations for this discipline to come from this level.
• Raising the bar around you. Coaching developers and less experienced Quality Engineers, pairing, reviewing, and shifting how a team works rather than only what it ships.
• Owning the quality measures. Automation coverage, defect escape rate, regression duration, and the delivery measures they feed: deployment frequency and lead time for change. Reporting them and being trusted on what they say.

Skills & Experience

• Strong software engineering skills. You are a credible engineer first: you design, build and operate systems, and you are comfortable across more than one stack.
• A track record of moving a team or a product from manual regression to automated confidence, and the judgement that comes from having done it on real, imperfect codebases.
• Framework and tooling design experience. You have built the automation others depend on, and you can explain the trade-offs you chose and the ones you got wrong.
• Depth in at least one specialist area: performance and load, resilience, test architecture, environments and test data, or testing AI-enabled behaviour.
• Fluent use of AI development tooling and a clear point of view on where it changes testing practice, backed by things you have actually tried.
• Influence without authority. You can take a position on quality to engineering leads, product managers and senior stakeholders, hold it under challenge, and change it when the evidence moves.
• Coaching instinct. You raise the people around you, and you would rather a team learn a practice than depend on you for it.

Nice to have

Performance and load testing at scale; desktop or on-premises products with long-lived supported releases and large dependency matrices; building or testing AI-enabled features, including evaluating non-deterministic behaviour; test data management, service virtualisation or contract testing; accessibility, security or compliance testing.

What this role is not

• Not a downstream verification role. Work does not arrive with you once a developer has finished with it.
• Not a sign-off or approval step. Nothing waits for your approval, and you are not accountable for other people’s code being correct.
• Not a manual testing role. Manual verification does not scale and cannot sit inside an AI-assisted workflow.
• Not a role you can do without writing code.

Why join us

Quality Engineering is a discipline we are deliberately building rather than one you inherit fully formed, so there is scope to shape practice beyond your own team, alongside the Head of Quality Engineering and the other Quality Engineers. We are investing in it: AI tooling, external expertise to help teams raise their automation game, and funded training.

How we work: small teams, short cycles, frequent releases. You build it, you run it. Clear direction rather than heavy process. Decisions made on evidence and revisited when the evidence changes.

Our purpose is to unlock global understanding. This means our work fundamentally recognizes the value of every language and culture. So, we celebrate difference, we are inclusive and believe that diversity makes us strong. We want every employee to grow as an individual and excel in their career. 

In return, we expect all our people to live by the values that unite us: to partner, putting clients fist and winning together, to pioneer, innovating fearlessly and leading with vision and courage, to progress, aiming high and growing through actions and to deliver, owning the outcome and building trust with our colleagues and clients.

RWS embraces DEI and promotes equal opportunity, we are an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind. RWS is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunity for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at RWS are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation. RWS will not tolerate discrimination based on any of these characteristics. 

RWS Values 

Get the 3Ps right – Partner, Pioneer, Progress – and we´ll Deliver together as RWS.

Recruitment Agencies: RWS Holdings PLC does not accept agency resumes.  Please do not forward any unsolicited resumes to any RWS employees.  Any unsolicited resume received will be treated as the property of RWS and Terms & Conditions associated with the use of such resume will be considered null and void.

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