Automation Engineer

We’re a digital insurance provider with ambitious plans to become The Best and Biggest in the UK market. Over the past few years, we've made significant investments in our data and tech capabilities, particularly within our CIO function. Our CIO team is at the forefront of driving innovation and ensuring our technology infrastructure supports our ambitious goals. We’ve nurtured our 4Cs culture, fostering collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement. We’re proud of the journey we’re on as a company and know that our continued success will rely on the contribution of our talented colleagues.

The CIO team plays a crucial role in this journey, working on cutting‑edge projects that enhance our digital presence and improve customer engagement. We provide insurance to nearly four million customers, but we know there’s even bigger opportunity out there. If you are excited about joining us and think you have some of what we are looking for, even if you’re not 100% sure, we would love to hear from you. Our CIO team is always looking for passionate individuals who are eager to make a difference and contribute to our success.

Job Details

You will be working as an individual collaborator on one of many sprint teams alongside colleagues that cross multiple disciplines. You will be actively taking part in sprint ceremonies; sharing updates and blockers in daily standups, estimating and committing in sprint planning or helping your team move forward in their behaviours by providing input in sprint retrospectives. You will ensure user stories are captured in accordance with your teams’ definition of ready, because you know how important that is to the quality of a delivered feature. You will ensure work items meet your team definition of ready, ensuring we are only building features from a common understanding. You will ensure work items are only complete when they meet the team definition of done and you will not be afraid to call this out. You will regularly collaborate with colleagues to write Acceptance Criteria that describe business rules for both functional and nonfunctional behaviours, the bedrock of quality test scenarios.

Skills we would love you to have

• You will be comfortable collaborating on an Agile sprint team in at least one of its forms: Scrum, Kanban, Safe.
• You will be confident and vocal in sprint ceremonies like stand‑ups, planning, retrospectives, 3‑amigos and backlog elaboration.
• You will be familiar with contributing to backlog management in Jira or Octane, collaborating with colleagues to define work items, and recording your own activity in tasks.
• You will be familiar with test case management in tools such as Octane or X‑Ray, ensuring your test scenarios and test results are traceable to work items for features.
• You can confidently collaborate in writing acceptance criteria using declarative gherkin to capture business rules that you can then run as automated tests with Cucumber.
• You will possess strong coding skills that you can demonstrate in implementing automated tests in one or more of Java, JavaScript, Typescript, C#.
• You will be comfortable with Source control using GitHub to collaborate with others and share your code.
• You will be skilled with user interface automation with Selenium & Selenium Grid, Playwright or Cypress.
• You will be able to implement tests against API either in code or via tools such as SoapUI, Postman.

What we offer

• Attractive salary based on experience (pay reviews also completed each year).
• Flexible Working – We champion a flexible and hybrid working approach.
• Competitive Bonus Scheme – All colleagues are eligible for our annual 4Cs performance bonus.
• Physical Wellbeing – We fund our colleagues to claim against everyday health care through our healthcare cash plan.
• Financial Wellbeing – Life assurance cover and income protection at no extra cost, pension contribution match up to 10%.
• Mental Wellbeing Programme – A range of support to help you keep yourself well.
• 25 days annual leave + bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell one of your contracted weeks.
• Access to private healthcare, dental plans, discounted health assessments, cycle to work and tech schemes.
• Most benefits and wellbeing resources are available to colleagues from their first day.

Our 4Cs principles are simple: we believe by creating the right culture for our colleagues and giving them the right tools to do their job, we’ll deliver good outcomes for every customer, helping us to grow the company profitably and sustainably and allowing us to invest in the communities we serve. Hastings Group is an equal opportunities employer which means we treat people fairly. We welcome applications from all suitably skilled persons regardless of their gender, age, race, disability, ethnic background, religion/belief, sexual orientation, gender reassignment or marital/family status.