Senior Software Quality Engineer in Edinburgh

About us

We’re Dayshape—an award-winning software scale-up with big ambitions and the momentum to match. Trusted by Big Four and many other top professional services firms globally, our AI-powered resource management platform is helping organisations to achieve extraordinary results. Our platform stands apart as the only solution that combines advanced AI, real-time project financials, and firm-wide insights to elevate resource management to a strategic function. By driving profitable growth, powering confident decisions, and ensuring satisfied clients and teams—we're helping our customers build strong organisations and careers for the long term.

Why our customers love Dayshape:

• We help professional firms optimise margins and increase revenue, unlocking access to more profitable work.
• We provide complete operational visibility today and the tools to confidently predict tomorrow.
• We empower firms to become the places where top talent wants to work - and the best clients want to work with.

Recognised as Scotland’s fastest-growing tech company in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for three consecutive years and more recently as the Enterprise Digital Tech Business of the Year at the 2024 Scotland ISA awards, we’ve consistently proven our ability to innovate and deliver real impact—and we’re always looking for like-minded people to join us. At Dayshape, our purpose is to improve people's working lives, and our culture is an important driving force in helping us to do just that. We’re a friendly, inclusive, and ambitious team—driven by our values and a shared commitment to success. If you’re ready to join a fast-growing, high-impact company that’s reimagining resource management, then let’s talk.

About the Role

We’re seeking a Senior Quality Engineer to join our Data Insights LLM team and lead quality assurance for large language model-powered systems. This role is ideal for an experienced SDET confident in complex, data-driven environments, collaborating closely with Software Engineers and Product to embed quality throughout the LLM feature lifecycle. As a Senior Quality Engineer, you’ll shape your team’s quality strategy — from testing and automation to risk-based decisions — while staying hands-on and adapting testing methods for LLMs. Beyond functional testing, you’ll help define and validate aspects such as accuracy, reliability, and user trust, supporting confident, risk-aware decisions. For the right candidate, there’s room to grow into wider technical and strategic ownership, influencing quality approaches across the business. This is a hands‑on role where you’ll contribute directly to test design and automation, shaping quality practices as our use of LLMs evolves.

What You'll Do

• Improve and maintain regression testing (manual and automated) for reliability and clarity, coaching others as needed.
• Shape and own quality approaches from discovery to release, championing risk-based practices.
• Design and update test automation and tooling, collaborating with engineers on architecture and testability.
• Manage test infrastructure and data, ensuring suitability for data-driven or probabilistic systems.
• Diagnose and triage test failures, reduce flakiness, and improve diagnostics.
• Support testing for customer hotfixes, leading reviews and embedding preventative actions.
• Plan and execute test strategies, including nondeterministic scenarios (e.g. LLM features).
• Maintain meaningful test artefacts and evidence, adapting for fast‑moving or nondeterministic contexts.
• Contribute to clear and actionable root cause analysis for bugs and defects.
• Participate in planning and refinement to clarify intent, identify risks, and define success criteria.
• Support release activities from a quality perspective, focusing on risk and readiness.
• Advise engineers on effective, risk-based testing approaches.
• Build strong domain knowledge to inform quality decisions and proactively address gaps.

About You

• Experienced SDET with strong software engineering skills, skilled in designing automation frameworks, contributing to codebases, and collaborating on testability and architecture.
• Proficient in production-quality code (ideally in C#).
• Owns team quality and embeds it throughout the process, influencing by collaboration and evidence.
• Proven at shaping team-level quality approaches in changing or uncertain environments.
• Applies a risk-based, pragmatic approach to testing and communicates coverage decisions clearly.
• Strong in exploratory testing, informing automation and design in complex systems.
• Quickly develops deep product understanding to inform quality decisions.
• Enjoys coaching and sharing knowledge to improve team quality mindset.
• Shows initiative and helps resolve obstacles for themselves and others to maintain progress.

Bonus Points For

• Hands on experience testing AI/LLM features, including handling nondeterministic behaviour and helping define or share effective testing approaches for these systems.
• Using heuristics and qualitative measures to assess output quality.
• Leveraging logs, metrics, or telemetry for investigation and validation.
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD workflows and developer tools.
• Experience as sole or primary QE in a team, owning quality end-to-end.

What you’ll get

• Starting salary £55,000 – £62,000, depending on experience and scope of the role.
• At least £1,000 per year to spend on professional and personal development.
• 33 days' holiday per year (including bank holidays), increasing by 1 day each year to a maximum of 40 days.
• Paid four‑week sabbatical in your fifth anniversary year on top of your holiday entitlement.
• Enhanced family leave policies.
• Private healthcare and rewards through AXA.
• Income protection and death in service cover.
• Matched 5% auto‑enrolment workplace pension scheme.
• Access to wellbeing offerings, such as our Employee Assistance Programme and a dedicated counselling service.
• Volunteering time – up to 20 hours a year to participate in volunteer work.
• Regular All Hands meeting for inspiration and over‑communication.
• Time out of the working week for team socials each month, with a mix of in‑person and virtual options: past events include hiking, family BBQs, board games and at‑home cocktail classes!
• Genuinely nice, smart people to work with, who are excited about growing our company.

Working Details

This is a full‑time role (37.5 hours per week). We typically work from 09:00 - 17:30 from Monday to Friday, though we can be a little flexible around this, just let us know. We are ideally looking for someone in/around Edinburgh, though we’re open to the possibility of this being a remote role (if you are in the UK). There is flexible hybrid working, so you will not need to come into the office every day (unless you want to!). Remote staff visit the Edinburgh office periodically for team events, workshops, and to connect with colleagues in person.

Join the team! Equality of opportunity is more than just a responsibility: we believe it is a huge advantage to welcome a variety of experiences and perspectives into the team. Diversity is a great asset and, as such, we strongly encourage applications from any background. This is your opportunity to really influence how we get things done, and how we measure and improve our capability to deliver software with high quality in a scalable way. We are doing well, but there are lots more to do to maintain the high bar and pace that we have set. Everyone here is growing personally as the company grows, so if that sounds like something you would like to be part of, we would love to see your application.

The deadline for applications is Monday 6th April at 12pm. Initial screens and interviews will be conducted around these dates. Please note the successful candidate for this role will be subject to background checks and will have an opportunity to declare anything to us beforehand.