Lead QA Engineer - 1 Year FTC (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds and London)

This is a senior, hands-on Lead QA role, responsible for strategy, frameworks, and raising QA standards across multiple squads. As a Lead QA Engineer at Genomics England with deep Java expertise, you’ll own the technical direction of quality across the organisation, tackling complex testing challenges and driving best practice at scale. You’ll shape how we approach testing, define standards, and act as a hands-on authority in modern QA. This role is about influence and expertise rather than people management, combining strategic thinking with strong technical delivery.

You’ll confidently and expertly design, build, and evolve automation test frameworks, act as a trusted authority across tribes, and mentor engineers/teams to raise skills and standards. Working closely with engineering leadership and product squads, you’ll take ownership of ensuring our systems are resilient, performant, and secure. A hands-on Lead QA role where your technical expertise sets the standard and you stay close to the code and tooling. You’ll shape QA strategy, mentor teams, work confidently with senior engineering leadership, and drive quality across the organisation, delivering impact and quality at scale.

Everyday responsibilities include:

• Act as a cross-tribe source of expertise in automation, performance, resilience, and security testing
• Design, build, and maintain robust test frameworks with a strong emphasis on both Java and Playwright
• Guide squads in embedding automated, performance, and security testing into CI/CD pipelines
• Mentor QA engineers and developers, raising skills and confidence across teams
• Produce clear, practical documentation and “golden paths” that help squads adopt best practice
• Confidently lead initiatives to improve test tooling, documentation, and knowledge sharing
• Collaborate with wider engineering leadership and other senior level stakeholders to embed test practices into CI/CD pipelines and shift testing left
• Define, track, and properly report on testing effectiveness metrics
• Stay current with new tools and techniques, bringing fresh thinking into our QA strategy

Essential skills and experience:

• Strong hands-on programming with both Java and Playwright
• Demonstrable experience designing and maintaining automation frameworks (e.g. Selenium WebDriver, JUnit, TestNG, REST-assured)
• Proven track record in performance testing (e.g. JMeter, Locust)
• Confident with security testing tools (e.g. OWASP Zap, Snyk)
• Experience embedding QA into CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitLab, Jenkins)
• Proven experience designing and implementing scalable test automation strategies and frameworks across multiple projects
• AWS/cloud-based testing experience (Terraform, containers, serverless, monitoring)
• Experience mentoring, coaching, and leading on QA strategy

Nice to have:

• Modern UI testing tools (e.g. Cypress, Browserstack, Robot Framework)
• Contract or mock API testing (e.g. PACT, WireMock)
• Accessibility testing tools (e.g. Axe-core)
• Knowledge of data privacy, compliance, and auditability in testing
• Familiarity with bioinformatics, scientific, or healthcare data is a strong plus

If you’re a proven and highly experienced Lead QA Engineer, still very much hands-on and motivated by setting standards, leading QA strategy, and solving complex QA challenges to have tangible impact across critical systems, this is your chance to lead from the front!

Qualifications: Relevant, and demonstrable experience operating at Lead QA level. No formal qualifications are required.

Additional Information: Salary From: £58,800. Please Note: This is a 1 Year FTC (Fixed Term Contract). Closing Date: Monday 2nd March at 23:00 (UK time).

Being an integral part of such a meaningful mission is extremely rewarding in itself, but in order to support our people, we’re continually improving our benefits package. We pride ourselves on investing in our people and supporting them to achieve their career goals, as well as offering a benefits package including:

• Generous Leave: 30 days’ holiday plus bank holidays, additional leave for long service, and the option to apply for up to 30 days of remote working abroad annually (approval required).
• Family-Friendly: Blended working arrangements, flexible working, enhanced maternity, paternity and shared parental leave benefits.
• Pension & Financial: Defined contribution pension (Genomics England double-matches up to 10%, however you can contribute more if you wish), Life Assurance (3x salary), and a Give As You Earn scheme.
• Learning & Development: Individual learning budgets, support for training and certifications, and reimbursement for one annual professional subscription (approval required).
• Recognition & Rewards: Employee recognition programme and referral scheme.
• Health & Wellbeing: Subsidised gym membership, a free Headspace account, and access to an Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, flu jabs.

Equal opportunities and our commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace: Genomics England is actively committed to providing and supporting an inclusive environment that promotes equity, diversity and inclusion best practice both within our community and in any other area where we have influence. We are proud of our diverse community where everyone can come to work and feel welcomed and treated with respect regardless of any disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, or social background.

Genomics England’s policies of non-discrimination and equity will be applied fairly to all people, regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partnership status, being pregnant or recently becoming a parent, race, religion or beliefs, sex or sexual orientation, length of service, whether full or part-time or employed under a permanent or a fixed-term contract or any other relevant factor. Genomics England does not tolerate any form of discrimination, harassment, victimisation or bullying at work. Such behaviour undermines our mission and core values and diminishes the dignity, respect and integrity of all parties. Our People policies outline our commitment to inclusivity.

We aim to remove barriers in our recruitment processes and to be flexible with our interview processes. Should you require any adjustments that may help you to fully participate in the recruitment process, we encourage you to discuss this with us.

Culture: We have four key behaviours that represent what we would like Genomics England to feel like and the culture we want to encourage, in order for us to achieve our mission. These behaviours help us all work well together, deliver on our outcomes, celebrate our successes and share feedback with each other.

Blended working model: Genomics England operates a blended working model as we know our people appreciate the flexibility that hybrid working can bring. We expect most people to come into the office a minimum of 2 times each month. However, this will vary according to role and will be agreed with your team leader. There is no expectation that people will return to the office full time unless they want to, however, some of our roles require full time on site attendance e.g., lab teams, reception team. Our teams and squads have, and will continue to reflect on what works best for them to work together successfully and have the freedom to design working patterns to suit, beyond the minimum. Our office locations are: Canary Wharf, Cambridge and Leeds.

Onboarding background checks: As part of our recruitment process, all successful candidates are subject to a Standard Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. We therefore require applicants to disclose any previous offences at point of application, as some unspent convictions may mean we are unable to proceed with your application due to the nature of our work in healthcare.