Senior Automation QA Engineer (Data Engineering)

Job Title:Senior Automation QA Engineer (Data Engineering)
Location: London or Cardiff - Fully remote
Salary/Rate:450-£500 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 maintainautomated test frameworksfor microservices and backend systems.
• Implement automated tests coveringfunctional, regression, integration, and end-to-end scenarios.
• Validatedata pipelines and data builds, ensuring accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability of data across systems.
• Performdata validation and reconciliationusing SQL and other data analysis techniques.
• Experience withperformance or load testing.
• Integrate automated tests intoCI/CD pipelinesand 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 intest automation for microservices-based architectures.
• Hands-on experience building and maintainingautomation frameworksusing Java or similar languages.
• Solid experience testingREST APIs, backend services, and service-to-service integrations.
• Proven experience validatingdata engineering pipelines, including ETL/ELT workflows, batch jobs, and scheduled data builds.
• StrongSQL skillsfor data validation, reconciliation, and analysis.
• Experience working withdata warehouses, data lakes, or big data platforms(e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Spark).
• Familiarity with integrating automated tests intoCI/CD pipelines(e.g., Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
• Familiarity withversion control systems(Git).
• Experience working incloud environments(Azure, AWS, or GCP).
• Understanding ofdistributed systems and microservices architecture.

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

• Exposure todata quality frameworks or monitoring tools.
• Experience working inAgile/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.