Lead Automation Engineer

Description

The company was set up because big banks were slow and their products did not suit small business owners. It is now a financial platform rather than just a credit card provider.

Its products include a business credit card, a spend management platform for small businesses, a savings product that reached £1 billion in funds within its first year, and a growing set of tools for running a small business.

The company has over 1,000 employees, £20bn in annual card spend, over 200,000 customers and over 17,000 Trustpilot reviews averaging 4.7 stars. It is profitable.

Quality Engineering works across the mission teams with Engineering, Product and UX, building quality in from the first stage of the software lifecycle rather than adding it at the end.

Interview process: a 30-minute intro with a Talent Partner covering your CV and values, then a 45-minute Tech Chat with the Team Manager, then a final round of a 60-minute code pairing session and a 30-minute stakeholder interview with Engineering and Product.

Responsibilities

• Report functionally to your mission team's Lead and act as the quality lead for your feature set.
• Own the testing strategy for your domain, such as payments, banking or onboarding, covering end-to-end quality and compliance, in partnership with the QA Team Lead.
• Be the main hands-on builder of automated tests across API, UI and mobile, and keep them maintained.
• Work with Product Owners and Developers from refinement onward so quality is designed in early.
• Set and manage the mission team's automation targets, using metrics such as MTTD, MTTR and defect escape rate to spot high-risk areas.
• Be the team's expert on the central automation frameworks and drive consistent use of CI/CD processes and quality gates.
• With the central Tooling Team, build custom helpers or data generators to fill team-specific gaps in the core framework.
• Make sure automated suites run inside CI/CD, giving quick, dependable releases and fail-fast feedback.
• Lead complex testing covering microservices, security (OWASP ZAP) and performance.
• Help developers and less experienced testers improve automation practice and test design.
• Promote AI tools such as Claude and GitHub Copilot for architecture exploration, incident investigation and test generation.
• Use component testing, service virtualisation and contract testing to cut dependencies so teams can test independently.
• Define test data and environment needs for both automated and exploratory testing.

Requirements

• 5+ years in QA automation or SDET roles, with a record of leading quality within an Agile team.
• Strong programming skills in C or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Prior work on card issuing, payment processing or credit risk systems.
• Hands-on use of UI automation tools such as Playwright or Cypress, and API testing tools such as REST Assured or other API frameworks.
• Familiarity with Azure, Git, and adding automated tests to deployment workflows.
• Ability to influence developers and Product Owners without formal authority, encouraging them to prioritise automation and quality.
• You are encouraged to apply even if you do not meet every requirement.

Conditions

The role is fully remote to start. Once the Lisbon office opens, it moves to a hybrid set-up with two days a week on site.

The role is a critical, hands-on position within a mission team.