At a Glance
- Tasks: Design and implement automated test frameworks and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines.
- Company: Join FT's Mobile Apps team, focused on delivering outstanding mobile experiences.
- Benefits: Work with award-winning digital products and collaborate with cross-functional teams.
- Other info: Experience with tools like Selenium, Cypress, and AWS Device Farm is desirable.
- Why this job: Be part of a passionate team engineering scalable quality systems for high confidence deployments.
- Qualifications: Proven experience in designing test strategies and strong programming skills in JavaScript, Java, or Python.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 80000 £ per year.
Requirements
- Proven experience designing test strategies, not just writing tests (unit, integration, E2E, and trade-offs between them)
- Experience designing and implementing automated guardrails that protect platform quality at scale
- Experience defining and using quality signals to support release decisions (e.g. test results, failure patterns, platform health metrics)
- Experience enabling multiple teams to deliver quality software without central QA dependency
- Experience building and maintaining automated quality gates in CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, CircleCI)
- Ability to define and improve test coverage, reliability, and signal quality (e.g. reducing flakiness, improving feedback loops)
- Strong programming skills (JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, or Python) with the ability to build maintainable, scalable test and quality tooling
- Hands-on experience testing web and mobile applications (iOS and Android)
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to diagnose issues across code, test, and environment
- Clear communication skills across engineering and non-technical stakeholders
- (Desirable) Experience defining platform-level quality standards, guardrails, and release criteria across multiple teams
- (Desirable) Experience improving or replacing flaky E2E test strategies with more effective approaches
- (Desirable) Knowledge of testing in production practices (feature flags, canary releases, rollback strategies)
- (Desirable) Familiarity with observability and production monitoring (e.g. Splunk, Grafana) and using these as quality signals
- (Desirable) Experience supporting or coaching teams to improve testing practices and confidence
- (Desirable) Experience influencing engineering practices across teams without direct authority
- (Desirable) Experience designing quality dashboards or reporting that provide actionable insights (not just coverage or pass rates)
- (Desirable) Familiarity with cloud-based device farms (e.g. BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, AWS Device Farm)
What the job involves
We’re looking for a Software Engineer in Test Automation who is passionate about engineering scalable quality systems and automated guardrails that ensure confidence in every deployment of FT’s award-winning digital products. You’ll join the Mobile Apps team, a multidisciplinary, 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 and QA Engineers to build scalable automation frameworks, integrate with CI/CD systems, and ensure high confidence in every deployment across our web and mobile platforms.
- Design, develop and maintain robust, reusable, and scalable automated test frameworks using tools like Selenium, Cypress, Appium or Playwright
- Integrate automated tests in CI/CD pipelines to support rapid, reliable delivery
- Optimise test suites for speed, stability, and clarity of failure
- Maintain infrastructure and tooling for distributed and parallel test execution (e.g Sauce Labs, BrowserStack, AWS Device Farm)
- Analyse user stories and system architecture to define effective and proportionate test coverage
- Design and implement functional, regression, smoke, and integration test scenarios
- Collaborate with teams to shift quality left by identifying risks early and integrating testability into software design
- Drive test data strategy and support deterministic, data-driven testing
- Make pragmatic trade-offs between delivery speed, risk, and quality
- Investigate flaky tests, failures, and false positives contributing to root cause analysis and resolution
- Collaborate effectively with teams to improve pipeline stability and feedback loops
- Contribute to the broader test engineering community, sharing learnings and evolving best practices
- Support teams to deliver quality software without reliance on central QA
Software Engineer in Test Automation employer: The Financial Times
FT offers a dynamic environment where you can work on award-winning digital products. Located in a collaborative setting, the Mobile Apps team focuses on delivering exceptional user experiences. You'll have the opportunity to influence engineering practices across teams while enjoying benefits like flexible working arrangements.
