We are looking for a passionate Principal Test Automation Engineer to help us drive our organisations approach to automated testing across all development squads. This is a hands-on technical role where you will be building the framework yourself, in our codebase where you will work along side the squads who use it.
You will be working within a cross functional team where you’ll build a containerised testing framework that creates isolated infrastructure for each test run. You’ll define CI/CD test strategies, introduce contract testing to reduce reliance on end-to-end tests, and establish enforceable standards that development squads can confidently adopt
Role: Principal Test Automation Engineer
Location: Liverpool City Centre HQ / Hybrid (3 days in office)
Salary: £70,000 - £80,000 (dependent on experience)
Working Hours: 37.5 hours per week, Monday to Friday
What you will be doing:
Design and build the shared test harness. Ephemeral infrastructure per test run, test data seeding and teardown, third-party stubbing, database and message assertion probes. Ship it as a versioned package squads consume rather than fork
Define how we classify tests by what they touch, and settle what belongs in CI and what belongs in CD
Establish the patterns for component, contract, API, end-to-end, UI, regression and performance testing, each with a working reference implementation in our own codebase
Own test data. Seeding through UI automation, API calls and direct database writes, with isolation that makes parallel execution safe
Design the quality gates in our Azure DevOps pipelines, and own how fast and how reliably tests run, including the flaky test problem
Work inside squads, pairing and reviewing, so teams get self-sufficient rather than dependent on you
Be the escalation point when a squad is stuck on test engineering
Lead root cause investigation into production incidents and test flakiness, and make sure what you find is covered by regression afterwards
Keep the conventions and agent instruction files current so AI coding tools extend the framework consistently rather than inventing their own patterns
Represent quality engineering in architecture and design forums, as a peer to Tech Leads and Principal Developers
Own the automation metrics that matter, and use them to drive an improvement backlog rather than to report status
Our Tech Stack:
Backend: xUnit, WebApplicationFactory, Testcontainers for .NET, WireMock.Net, MassTransit Test Harness, Respawn, Bogus, Verify
Web and Mobile: Playwright with TypeScript, Maestro, Vitest, React Testing Library, Mock Service Worker
Testing (cross-cutting): Postman, Pact for contract testing, axe-core for accessibility, k6 and NBomber for load and performance, SonarCloud quality gates
Infrastructure: Azure, Docker, Kubernetes (AKS), Nginx, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus
Tooling and Practices: Azure DevOps, Git, CI/CD pipelines, Agile methodologies
What we are looking for:
Senior or Principal-level experience in test automation or quality engineering, where you built the framework rather than worked within one somebody else built
Strong TypeScript and Playwright. Maestro or similar for mobile
Working proficiency in C# and .NET. You'll be writing component and integration tests against our microservices with xUnit or NUnit, and seeding test data through domain code rather than raw SQL
Docker and containerised test environments, including standing up infrastructure per test run with Testcontainers or equivalent
Service virtualisation and HTTP stubbing, using WireMock or similar, to test a service in isolation
Experience testing event-driven systems. Asynchronous messaging, eventual consistency, and asserting on published messages. We run RabbitMQ and Azure Service Bus through MassTransit
Contract testing between services with Pact or equivalent, covering message schemas as well as HTTP
Test data management across UI, API and database, with isolation that supports parallel runs, and synthetic…