Manual QA Engineer in London

The Financial Times is one of the world’s leading news organisations, globally recognised for its authority, integrity and accuracy, with a mission to deliver quality information and services worldwide. At the FT, curiosity thrives and ambitious thinking is rewarded. Together, we help audiences stay better informed and deepen their understanding of the world around them.

Our Product & Tech teams drive us forward in an ever-evolving digital landscape, delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers daily. Our growth relies on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists. With a supportive culture, entrepreneurial spirit and opportunities at every turn, there are no limits to where your FT career can take you.

We’re looking for a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer passionate about implementing and maintaining quality processes to deliver reliable, high-quality, and premium digital experiences to millions of FT readers worldwide. You’ll play a key role in ensuring our products are robust, performant, and user-friendly, helping us deliver value across web, mobile, and backend systems.

As a QA Engineer, you’ll be embedded in the mobile application team, a cross-functional group focused on delivering an outstanding mobile experience for our world class news. You’ll collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, business analysts and designers. You’ll help identify risks early, uphold quality throughout the development lifecycle, support post-release by working with Customer Support, and drive continuous improvements in testing practices.

What You’ll Do

• Analyse requirements and user stories to ensure clear, testable acceptance criteria.
• Perform testing across manual tests covering frontend (web, mobile) and backend systems.
• Validate RESTful and GraphQL APIs (RESTful services) and integration points across distributed systems to ensure feature quality and determine the risk of release.
• Conduct exploratory, technical and smoke testing to uncover issues and drive improvements.
• Use checklists and analytics to support issue triaging and investigation.

Monitoring & Quality Strategy

• Define and implement QA best practices for all projects.
• Track, report, and manage defects, ensuring thorough documentation and resolution.
• Monitor logs and create alerts to observe the application behaviour using Splunk, Grafana, CloudWatch, Amplitude, and Looker to detect anomalies and performance issues.
• Contribute to the adoption of quality metrics that reflect real user experience and engineering confidence.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to integrate quality early in the lifecycle.
• Get involved in Scrum and Kanban processes from the start. Being an active participant in team refinement sessions by injecting quality early into user stories.
• Support production issues and customer-reported bugs by liaising with support teams.
• Identify gaps in testing or process and advocate for pragmatic improvements in team retrospectives.
• Communicate progress, risks, and insights clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What You’ll Bring

Essential

• Apply strong analytical skills to identify risks and spot gaps early.
• Collaborate with the team to shape high-quality stories, not just test them.
• Actively engage with tickets to ensure clear, testable acceptance criteria (e.g. using the INVEST principle).
• Drive continuous improvements in testing practices across the development lifecycle.
• Solid understanding of QA methodologies, including functional and non-functional, smoke test, and exploratory testing within an agile framework.
• Demonstrable experience testing REST and GraphQL APIs with Postman or equivalent tools.
• Strong experience working with Proxy tools like Charles, Browser Inspector and other network debugging tools.
• Testing experience across platforms: web, iOS, Android.
• Exposure to cloud platforms and monitoring tools like AWS, Splunk, Grafana, Firebase, Cloudwatch, Looker and Amplitude.
• Understanding of shift-left testing approaches and the benefits they bring to agile development teams.

Desirable

• Experience using analytics to support quality investigations and decision-making.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to drive QA strategy and foster a culture of quality across teams.
• Comfortable using tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Testmo, or similar.
• Experience with frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright or Appium.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines.

What’s in it for you?

Our benefits vary by location but we are committed to providing best-in-class perks across all our offices. These include generous annual leave, medical cover, inclusive parental leave packages, subsidised gym memberships and opportunities to give back to the community. Full details of our benefits are available here.

We’ve embraced a 50% hybrid working model (averaging two to three days onsite) that fosters trust and remote adaptability while encouraging in-person camaraderie and peer learning. Additionally, we are open to accommodating specific flexible working pattern requests for all roles where feasible.

Accessibility

We are a disability confident employer and Valuable 500 signatory. Please let us know if you require any reasonable adjustments/personalisation as part of the application process or to enable you to attend an interview. If you would like to discuss your requirements or have any questions, email and a member of our team will be happy to help.

Further information

At the FT, we embrace innovation and the use of technology and appreciate that individuals may leverage AI tools as part of their job application process. Whilst we are happy for you to use AI to assist with your application, it is essential that all information provided is authentic and accurately represents your skills, experience, and qualifications.

Candidates should be aware that the use of AI throughout the application process may be monitored to ensure a fair and transparent hiring process for all. Please beware of fraudulent job postings and offers claiming to be from the Financial Times. All legitimate opportunities will direct you to apply through the official Financial Times careers site, and the FT will never ask for financial information, payments, or referrals to third parties during the hiring process. If you have any concerns about the legitimacy of a job posting or suspect any scam activity, please contact.

Interested in the FT but don’t see the right role yet? Join our Talent Community to receive exclusive updates, featured jobs, and insights into working at the FT.