Senior Automation QA Engineer (Data Engineering)

Job Title: Senior Automation QA Engineer (Data Engineering)
Location: London or Cardiff - once a month in the office
Salary/Rate: £500/600 per day inside IR35
Start Date: 05/05/2026
Job Type: Contract

Company Introduction
We are seeking a Senior Automation QA Engineer to drive quality across microservices-based systems and data engineering platforms. This role requires strong hands-on experience in test automation, backend and API validation, and data pipeline testing, with the ability to work across complex, distributed architectures.The ideal candidate will collaborate closely with software engineers, data engineers, and product teams to ensure reliable, high-quality delivery of services and data products.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives

• Design, develop, and maintain automated test frameworks for microservices and backend systems.
• Implement automated tests covering functional, regression, integration, and end-to-end scenarios.
• Validate data pipelines and data builds, ensuring accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability of data across systems.
• Perform data validation and reconciliation using SQL and other data analysis techniques.
• Experience with performance or load testing.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and support quality gates throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Analyse test failures, identify root causes, and work with engineering teams to drive fixes.
• Review requirements, designs, and technical solutions to identify quality risks early.
• Mentor junior QA engineers and contribute to improving overall QA and automation maturity.

Required Skills/Experience
The ideal candidate will have the following:

• Strong experience in test automation for microservices-based architectures.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining automation frameworks using Java or similar languages.
• Solid experience testing REST APIs, backend services, and service-to-service integrations.
• Proven experience validating data engineering pipelines, including ETL/ELT workflows, batch jobs, and scheduled data builds.
• Strong SQL skills for data validation, reconciliation, and analysis.
• Experience working with data warehouses, data lakes, or big data platforms(e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Spark).
• Familiarity with integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines(e.g., Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
• Familiarity with version control systems(Git).
• Experience working in cloud environments(Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Understanding of distributed systems and microservices architecture.

Desirable Skills/Experience
Although not essential, the following skills are desired by the client:

• Exposure to data quality frameworks or monitoring tools.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum delivery models.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.
Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.