Principal QA Engineer

We’re seeking a Principal Quality Engineer to elevate quality engineering across Cloudsmith – strengthening quality practices across engineering teams, shaping our testing strategy, and ensuring the platform meets the reliability standards required by critical infrastructure.

About Cloudsmith: Cloudsmith is building the operating system for the modern software supply chain. We run a global, fully managed, multi‑tenant SaaS platform that helps organizations, from startups to the Fortune 500, secure, govern, and distribute software artifacts at scale. Worldwide, our customers use Cloudsmith as a critical infrastructure control plane for CI/CD, developer workflows, security controls, compliance, and software distribution, supporting 30+ formats and ecosystems across languages, containers, and operating systems.

The Role: As a Principal Quality Engineer, you’ll be the person who shapes what quality engineering looks like at Cloudsmith – embedding quality thinking into how every engineering team works, and raising the bar across the entire organization. That means improving testability at every stage of the product development lifecycle, treating testing as a continuous activity that runs alongside development, and helping engineers take genuine ownership of quality in their own work.

Key Responsibilities:

• Drive the quality engineering strategy across the platform.
• Define Cloudsmith’s approach to quality – how we test, what we measure, and what confidence we need before we ship.
• Build quality capability in engineering teams.
• Define the measures that matter.
• Shape how we build and ship safely.
• Raise the quality culture across the engineering organization.

Required Experience, Qualities & Skills:

• Significant hands‑on experience in quality engineering roles, with a track record that includes defining and delivering testing strategy at an organizational level.
• 8+ years in QA or quality engineering, with the last few at senior or lead level.
• Proven experience testing at scale on distributed cloud infrastructure.
• Deep expertise in test automation, including E2E frameworks, API testing, and CI/CD integrations.
• Strong understanding of software delivery and deployment patterns.
• The ability to identify risk in a system and reason about it clearly.
• A genuine belief that quality is a team capability to be built.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills.

Cultural Values We're Looking For:

• Automate everything.
• Collective ownership.
• Transparency.
• Bias for action.
• Just better.
• Customer collaboration.

Impact & Opportunity: This role offers the chance to shape and evolve quality engineering standards at a company whose platform thousands of engineering teams depend on to control and secure their software supply chain.

Growth & Development: This role is designed as a senior individual‑contributor position, with a scope that spans the whole engineering organisation.

Benefits, Location & Work Environment: A position based in Ireland or the United Kingdom. A competitive compensation package, including equity. Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance. Generous annual leave and flexible working policies to suit your lifestyle. Professional development budget for conferences and training.

Health and Wellness: Regardless of your location, we deeply care about the health and wellness of our staff and their families; a sustainable pace is important to us.

Personal Growth: You will have an enormous opportunity to learn new skills alongside your colleagues, and your continued professional development is essential to us because it's important to you.

Facilities: Cloudsmith is headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with fully‑equipped office space that’s open 24x7.

About Equal Opportunity: Cloudsmith is an equal‑opportunity employer proud to nurture a diverse workplace that welcomes applications from individuals of all races, genders, and ethnic groups.