Principal QA Engineer in Manchester

At Anaplan, we are a team of innovators focused on optimizing business decision-making through our leading AI-infused scenario planning and analysis platform so our customers can outpace their competition and the market. What unites Anaplanners across teams and geographies is our collective commitment to our customers’ success and to our Winning Culture. Our customers rank among the who’s who in the Fortune 50. Coca‑Cola, LinkedIn, Adobe, LVMH and Bayer are just a few of the 2,400+ global companies who rely on our best‑in‑class platform.

Our Winning Culture is the engine that drives our teams of innovators. We champion diversity of thought and ideas, we behave like leaders regardless of title, we are committed to achieving ambitious goals, and we love celebrating our wins – big and small. Supported by operating principles of being strategy‑led, values‑based and disciplined in execution, you’ll be inspired, connected, developed and rewarded here. Everything that makes you unique is welcome; join us and let’s build what’s next - together!

Team Description: We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to own and define the testing strategies on our data pipeline platform — an interactive, canvas‑based tool that lets customers visually design complex data processing workflows with built‑in governance, quality rules, and anomaly detection. While still hands‑on, your primary focus will be acting as the quality leader for the team. You’ll work with Product and Engineering to set the quality bar, guiding the effort to explore, probe, and question the product to find the gaps that others miss.

Your Impact:

• Own and define exploratory testing across the platform, establishing the processes and runbooks used to identify critical edge cases and user journeys.
• Act as the primary QA partner to Product and Engineering, translating requirements into test strategies and ensuring alignment on quality expectations before development begins.
• Work side‑by‑side with engineers as a technical leader — you’re an embedded partner who acts as the escalation point to move critical issues forward.
• Lead the prioritisation of defects based on customer impact and business risk, ensuring the team makes the right trade‑offs.
• Oversee and guide our offshore QA team on system integration testing and performance testing, ensuring their efforts align with the overall quality strategy.
• Define and refine non‑functional requirements (NFRs) to guide performance and reliability efforts.
• Champion quality thinking across the team — helping everyone build better software, not just catching mistakes.

Your Skills:

• Extensive background in manual testing with a focus on exploratory and stress testing.
• Experience defining test strategies for complex products, not just executing them.
• Strong communication skills — you can articulate issues clearly, written and verbal, to engineers, Product, and leadership.
• Proven ability to provide technical leadership and act as an escalation point within agile engineering teams.
• Experience with defect tracking and test management tools (Jira or similar).
• Comfortable defining and working with NFRs for performance, scalability, and reliability.

Desirable:

• You think like a user and a detective — curious, sceptical, and thorough.
• You’ve worked on data‑heavy or workflow‑based products before.
• Some automation experience (Selenium, Playwright, or similar) — not essential, but a bonus.
• You’ve helped shape QA practices and culture, not just executed test plans.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB): We believe attracting and retaining the best talent and fostering an inclusive culture strengthens our business. DEIB improves our workforce, enhances trust with our partners and customers, and drives business success. Build your career in a place where diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging aren’t just words on paper – this is what drives our innovation, it’s how we connect, and it contributes to what makes us a market leader.

We believe in a hiring and working environment where all people are respected and valued, regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, disability status, citizenship, or any other aspect which makes people unique. We hire you for who you are, and we want you to bring your authentic self to work every day!

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, perform essential job functions, and receive equitable benefits and all privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.