QA Engineer in Manchester

The world around us is experiencing significant change, the greatest in generations. At Motion Applied, we’re accelerating the response to that change. Our vision is that our people and technologies will pioneer a better future. Our mission is to achieve breakthroughs in performance. We’re at the cutting edge of innovation in industries including automotive transportation and motorsport. We create solutions that drive efficiency and cost-effectiveness. We want to help to reduce the carbon footprint and become more sustainable. Our focus is on electrification and telemetry, control and analytics.

To deliver efficient lightweight electric powertrain and vehicle development; motorsport solutions that make series more sustainable and efficient; reliable connectivity solutions for transportation and insightful analytics and monitoring of transport fleets. By applying our expertise, we deliver real benefits and pioneer a better future.

We are seeking a talented QA Engineer to join our dynamic engineering team. You will play a crucial role in ensuring the quality and reliability of our advanced technology solutions, contributing to projects that span motorsport telemetry systems, automotive innovations, and vehicle communications for mass transport platforms. This role involves close collaboration with developers, QAs, and product owners to uphold high-quality standards and continuously improve testing practices, reporting to QA Lead. We welcome candidates with strong testing expertise and a passion for quality.

Key Responsibilities

• Test Planning & Design: Review feature requirements, technical specifications, and user stories to understand scope. Identify test conditions using structured design techniques (e.g. boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning). Write and review test cases for functional, non-functional, edge cases, and user workflows. Ensure traceability between requirements, tests, and defects.
• Test Execution: Execute manual and/or automated tests for APIs, UI, firmware, and embedded systems. Conduct exploratory testing to uncover unanticipated issues. Re-test resolved defects and validate change impact. Log detailed defects with replication steps, logs, and environment details.
• Environment & Data Preparation: Set up local or remote test environments (e.g. simulation rigs, software environments). Provision or request specific test data configurations. Ensure test setups match the test plan (e.g. firmware version, hardware variant).
• Continuous Improvement & Documentation: Review test failures and identify improvement areas (e.g. missing checks, better mocks). Propose changes to test design, coverage, or testability practices. Contribute to documentation including test plans, execution logs, and regression summaries.
• Sprint Activities & Collaboration: Attend sprint planning, backlog refinement, and daily stand-ups. Collaborate with developers, analysts, and product owners to clarify requirements. Estimate testing effort and participate in risk-based test planning. Represent QA within cross-functional product squads.
• Defect Management & Reporting: Log and triage defects in Jira. Work with developers to reproduce and troubleshoot issues. Update test metrics dashboards (pass/fail, blocked, untested cases).

Required Qualifications

• Technical Skills: Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field. 4+ years of experience in software quality assurance and testing. Experience with automated testing tools (e.g. Selenium WebDriver, Robot Framework, Python). Strong experience in manual testing across software, hardware, and embedded systems. Familiarity with test management tools (e.g. qTest, Jira). Strong Windows and Linux (SSH) skills. Understanding of networking concepts (Wi-Fi, POE, Ethernet). Experience with backend testing and API validation. Knowledge of Agile methodologies and CI/CD practices.
• Professional Skills: Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities. Strong attention to detail and a systematic approach to testing. Effective communication skills for documentation and cross-team collaboration. Ability to work in fast-paced, deadline-driven environments. Commitment to continuous learning and improvement.
• Desirable Skills: Familiarity with cloud platforms and containerisation technologies. Testing on different browsers and devices. Understanding of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing concepts. Experience with SQL, shell scripting (e.g. Bash), and tools like RabbitMQ, Icinga, Influx. ISTQB certification or equivalent. Experience with Jira. AWS and configuration management tools (e.g. Git). Familiarity with mobile communication technologies (3G, 4G, 5G, LTE).

What we can offer you

• Annual leave (25 days + bank holidays, pro-rated for part time colleagues).
• Enhanced Company Maternity, Paternity and Adoption leave and pay.
• Flexible working policies, including Hybrid Working.
• Life assurance to the value of 4 times base salary.
• Opportunity to join the Applied Pension Plan.
• Company funded individual private healthcare with the opportunity to extend to partner or spouse and/or dependents at a discounted rate.
• Electric car scheme – opportunity to drive a brand-new car in a more affordable way through this salary sacrifice scheme. Employees are eligible to join the scheme after successful completion of their probationary period.

Who we are

Motion Applied (formerly McLaren Applied) are a medium-sized tech firm spun out of McLaren Group. We’re looking for people who will thrive in a non-hierarchical, growth-oriented company, self-starters who are flexible and somewhat entrepreneurial in their approach. Applied are committed to Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) and promote DEI in all we do.