Senior Test Automation Engineer in Sheffield

About Certara

Certara accelerates the potential of bringing medicines to market and to patients using biosimulation software, technology, and services to transform traditional drug discovery and development. Our clients include more than 2,400 biopharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and regulatory agencies across 70 countries. Our goal is to enable the life sciences industry’s use of data, modeling, and analytics to make better decisions across the various phases of discovery and drug development.

This is a great opportunity for an ambitious test automation engineer who wants to be involved in a greenfield software project that supports faster and cheaper development of new medicines. You’ll own the test automation strategy and architecture for our web products and drive the wider team to adopt testing best practice. It’s a hands‑on role: you’ll be in the code daily, building and owning the automation frameworks yourself and using AI to amplify how much you and the team can deliver, while setting direction for testing, raising engineering quality across the team, and mentoring others.

AI‑assisted engineering is core to how we work. We use tools such as Cursor and Claude every day to design, write and review code and tests, and we expect this role to push that further, pioneering how AI accelerates test automation, raises coverage and quality, and helps the team move faster. You should be fluent with AI development tools and excited to set the standard for using them well.

Our web testing spans:

• Web UI: automated with Playwright, for React frontends
• APIs: .NET services hosted on Azure
• Azure cloud services and messaging: event‑ and queue‑driven integrations such as Azure Service Bus (queues and topics), Event Grid and Event Hubs, Queue Storage, and asynchronous/batch processing (e.g. Azure Functions, Azure Batch)

The role requires close liaison with Engineers, Scientists and other staff on an ongoing basis, so strong communication and influencing skills are essential. The candidate must be eligible to work in the UK.

About the project

We’re building the next generation of cloud‑based workflow tools for our Simcyp products, the modelling and simulation software that pharmaceutical companies and regulators rely on to understand how drugs behave in the body long before they reach a patient. Today, modelling teams set up and run that work in many different ways, and results aren’t always easy to reproduce or share. Our goal is to change that: to make sophisticated simulation workflows straightforward to build, share and run reliably at scale, with AI woven through the experience. This is greenfield work, and it’s the future of our business: high‑profile, technically ambitious, and genuinely meaningful, because the faster and more reliably our customers can run their science, the sooner they can develop and deliver new medicines.

What you’ll achieve (first 6–12 months)

• A clear, documented test automation strategy for the platform that the team understands and follows.
• Reliable pipelines and broad coverage across the whole test pyramid (unit, integration, API and UI), with faster feedback and clearer failure diagnostics.
• A maintainable, well‑adopted automation framework (patterns, helpers, examples) that engineers use every day.
• Testing shifted earlier in the lifecycle, with quality built in rather than inspected at the end.
• Regular coaching and upskilling of software engineering teams in testing practice, growing into a trusted advisor who raises quality across the wider group, not just within QA.

Responsibilities

• Own the automation architecture for web UI, API and cloud‑service testing, including event‑driven and queue‑based Azure architecture (Service Bus, Event Grid/Hubs, queues, batch processing): frameworks, patterns, standards, and tooling choices.
• Lead the use of AI in test automation: use AI and agentic tooling to accelerate test design and creation, drawing on requirements and the implemented code to produce well‑targeted test sets at the right levels of the pyramid, with the team reviewing, refining and owning the results.
• Set the standard for how we apply AI to testing well.
• Drive best practice across the team: set testing standards, review approaches, and coach engineers to raise the overall bar.
• You drive from within the codebase, building the frameworks and reference examples others follow.
• Design and maintain robust automated suites focused on reliability, maintainability and clear failure diagnostics.
• Improve CI execution, reporting and diagnostics, and broaden automated coverage across the test pyramid.
• Integrate testing into CI/CD with sensible quality gates; partner with engineers on testability by design.
• Work with engineers and stakeholders to reproduce issues, support triage, and improve quality earlier in the lifecycle.
• Contribute to the Testing Chapter: standards, learning paths, and technical direction.

Qualifications

Essential

• Strong hands‑on test automation skills: building automation frameworks / shared components (libraries, utilities, patterns, CI integration), and the drive to deepen your design skills further.
• Strong web UI automation with Playwright: we use Playwright with C# against modern React frontends, with JavaScript and/or TypeScript also valuable.
• Strong API test automation (REST): reusable clients/helpers, schema checks, auth flows, test data setup/teardown.
• Fluency with AI‑assisted development tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude) as part of everyday engineering, using them to accelerate test automation, and able to lead the team in applying them well.
• An appetite for raising standards and influencing others: keen to share good testing practice, mentor peers and grow into a team‑wide leadership role, with strong communication skills.
• Experience improving CI execution and test reliability: better diagnostics and reporting, and broader automated coverage across the test pyramid.

Desired

• Experience in an Agile environment and with delivery tooling such as Azure DevOps and/or Jira.
• Performance and load testing: designing and running tests to validate responsiveness and scalability under load (e.g. k6, JMeter, Gatling, Azure Load Testing), and interpreting the results.
• Security testing: incorporating security checks into automated suites and CI (e.g. OWASP ZAP, dependency/vulnerability scanning, basic penetration‑testing awareness).
• Experience in life sciences, pharma, or other regulated environments, with awareness of traceability/auditability and disciplined change control.

Certara bases all employment‑related decision on merit, taking into consideration qualifications, skills, achievement, and performance. We treat all applicants and employees without regard to personal characteristics such as race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, nationality, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental condition, genetic information, military service, or other characteristic protected by law.