Senior QA Engineer in London

Music is Universal
It’s the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the world’s leading music company. From A&R to finance, legal to digital, sales to marketing, Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.

Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles, and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, age, marital status, background, pregnancy, or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism, dyslexia, ADHD, and other forms of neurocognitive variation.

We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment, workplaces, and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards, including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition, please email UniversalMusicCareers@umusic.com.

Core Skills

A senior QA engineer should act as a quality leader, mentor, and strategic contributor across delivery teams.

• Strong ownership of overall product or platform quality

• Ability to define QA strategy, test approach, and release quality standards

• Excellent analytical and critical-thinking skills

• Strong communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders

• Ability to influence engineering teams without relying on authority

• Confidence challenging requirements and delivery plans where quality risks exist

• Strong risk-based decision-making

• Ability to balance delivery speed with quality, maintainability, security, and scalability

• Mentoring and coaching of junior and mid-level QA engineers

• Ability to lead defect triage, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement activities

• Strong stakeholder management across product, engineering, architecture, DevOps, and delivery teams

• Ability to translate business requirements into testable acceptance criteria

• Strong facilitation skills in refinement, planning, retrospectives, and release readiness discussions

• Proactive approach to identifying gaps in process, tooling, environments, and automation coverage

• Ability to promote a shared quality mindset across the team

• Strong documentation skills for test strategies, automation standards, release risks, and quality reports

• Comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs in complex delivery environments

• Ability to support high-quality delivery of solutions that are fit for purpose, maintainable, robust, scalable, and secure

Technical Skills

Test Automation & Strategy

• Strong experience designing, building, and maintaining test automation frameworks

• Ability to select appropriate tools for UI, API, integration, contract, performance, and end-to-end testing

• Strong programming ability in C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, or another relevant automation language

• Deep understanding of automation patterns such as Page Object Model, Screenplay, API client abstraction, test fixtures, reusable test data builders, and service mocks

• Ability to design automation that is scalable, maintainable, reliable, and suitable for CI/CD

• Experience reducing flaky tests and improving automation execution speed

• Ability to define automation standards, coding guidelines, and review test code

UI Testing

• Good understanding of web application testing, especially Angular-based applications

• Experience testing UI behaviour, forms, validation, routing, authentication flows, and browser compatibility

• Ability to write or maintain automated UI tests using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or similar

• Basic understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser developer tools

• Ability to define frontend test coverage across unit, component, integration, UI, and end-to-end layers

• Experience testing complex user journeys, state management, routing, validation, authentication, and accessibility

• Ability to advise on testability improvements in frontend code

API Testing

• Experience testing REST APIs

• Strong knowledge of REST API testing, including authentication, authorisation, routing, middleware behaviour, configuration, validation, and error handling

• Good understanding of C# and .NET application architecture

• Ability to test service boundaries, integrations, retries, failure modes, and resilience patterns

• Ability to contribute to test strategy for micro-services and distributed systems

• Ability to use tools such as Postman, Swagger, Insomnia, or REST-assured-style frameworks

• Ability to validate API contracts, error handling, edge cases, and integration points

• Experience with contract testing, service virtualisation, mocking, and stubbing

Cloud, DevOps, CI/CD & Version Control

• Experience using cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud

• Ability to test applications deployed to cloud-based environments

• Understanding of configuration differences across dev, test, staging, and production-like environments

• Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines

• Ability to define quality gates in GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, AWS pipelines, or similar

• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes from a testing and deployment perspective

Database, Data Testing

• Strong SQL skills for test data setup, validation, and investigation

• Experience testing systems that use Redis, Elasticsearch, or other NoSQL technologies

• Ability to test caching, indexing, search accuracy, data consistency, and data migration scenarios

• Ability to design robust test data strategies across integrated environments

Quality Engineering Practices

• Strong understanding of test design techniques, including boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, decision tables, and exploratory testing

• Ability to create clear test cases, test scenarios, and acceptance criteria

• Understanding of Agile delivery and working within Scrum or Kanban teams

About UMG UK

We are Universal Music Group UK – the UK’s leading music-based entertainment company. We exist to shape culture through the power of artistry. We help UK artists produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to inspire and entertain fans at home and around the world.

Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits

• Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)

• Private Medical Insurance

• 25 paid days of annual leave

• Interest Free Season Ticket Loan

• Holiday Purchase scheme

• Dental and Travel Insurance options

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Salary Sacrifice Cars

• Subsidised Gym Membership

• Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)

Just So You Know…

The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However, the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholder's specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore, the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent, definitive, and exhaustive statement.

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