Principal Quality Assurance Engineer

Quality Engineering Lead | Remote – Leeds / London | £115,000

Are you a senior Quality Engineering professional who wants to shape how an entire engineering organisation builds, tests and delivers software?

We're looking for a Principal Engineer specialising in Quality Engineering to define and drive quality strategy across a growing portfolio of products and platforms. This is a newly created, high-impact role where you'll work closely with senior engineering leadership to improve engineering standards, strengthen delivery confidence and ensure quality keeps pace with an increasingly AI-driven development environment.

Combining technical leadership, architectural thinking and hands-on engineering, you'll influence how more than ten engineering teams approach quality, while building the tools, frameworks and guardrails that enable them to deliver reliable software at scale.

The Role

You'll take ownership of the technical direction for Quality Engineering across multiple products and platforms, ensuring quality is embedded throughout the software development lifecycle rather than treated as a final checkpoint before release.

Working alongside senior engineering leaders, Staff Engineers, Technical Leads and Product teams, you'll establish practical standards, demonstrate best practice through working implementations and drive adoption across the organisation.

With AI and agentic development creating opportunities to deliver software faster, you'll also help define how testing, assurance and evaluation evolve to maintain reliability, manage risk and protect customer outcomes.

This is a senior individual contributor position, offering significant influence over engineering strategy without the responsibility of managing a team.

What You'll Be Doing

• Define and evolve the Quality Engineering strategy across multiple products, platforms and engineering teams.
• Establish quality standards, architectural principles and practical guardrails that engineers can implement within their own teams.
• Improve testability, observability and recoverability across CI/CD pipelines and progressive delivery processes.
• Design and develop shared regression suites, smoke testing capabilities and reusable quality tooling.
• Build quality agents and agentic testing capabilities to help teams adopt effective testing practices at scale.
• Develop approaches for evaluating AI-powered features and agents, including evaluation frameworks, red-team testing and drift detection.
• Take hands-on responsibility for complex or high-risk engineering changes where additional assurance is needed.
• Work with Product, Customer Support and Customer Success to connect engineering quality with customer experience and business outcomes.
• Coach and influence Technical Leaders and other Software Engineers, embedding sustainable quality practices across the organisation.
• Investigate systemic quality issues and define the technical improvements needed to prevent them from recurring.

Essential Experience

• Proven experience setting Quality Engineering strategy across an entire engineering function, rather than within a single team or product.
• Strong architectural understanding of testability, observability, recoverability, CI/CD and progressive delivery.
• Demonstrable success changing engineering practices through hands-on examples, reference implementations and coaching.
• Strong practical engineering capability, with experience working directly in codebases, pipelines and shared tooling.
• Experience designing and improving shared regression suites, smoke tests and testing infrastructure across multiple teams.
• A risk-based approach to assurance, using delivery, incident, customer or commercial data to guide decisions.
• Experience influencing senior engineering stakeholders and driving adoption across teams without direct line-management authority.
• Practical experience with technologies such as PHP or Python, Playwright, GitHub Actions, AWS and feature flagging, or close equivalents.

Desirable Experience

• Experience developing quality agents or reusable AI-driven engineering capabilities.
• Practical exposure to testing AI-powered features or agents, including evaluation frameworks, red teaming and drift detection.
• Experience within a SaaS or product-led technology business.
• Familiarity with PHP, Symfony, Docker and AWS.
• Experience improving engineering practices within a rapidly growing organisation.
• Experience extending quality standards into Product, Customer Support, Customer Success or other business functions.

About You

You're a credible technical leader who can move comfortably between strategic discussions and hands-on engineering. You influence through technical expertise, evidence and practical delivery rather than relying on authority or process alone.

You're commercially aware, understand the relationship between quality, delivery speed, cost and customer outcomes, and can bring people with you when challenging established ways of working.

Above all, you see quality as an engineering responsibility that runs throughout the development lifecycle. You enjoy enabling others to deliver better software and measure success by the improvements adopted across an organisation, not simply by the tests you write yourself.

Why Apply?

• Organisation-wide influence: Shape Quality Engineering across more than ten teams and multiple products.
• Strategic ownership: Define the standards, architecture and tooling that underpin engineering quality.
• AI-driven innovation: Help establish how quality assurance evolves alongside agentic software development.
• Hands-on technical leadership: Combine strategy and coaching with building practical solutions.
• Senior stakeholder exposure: Work closely with engineering leadership and contribute to wider technical strategy.
• Meaningful impact: Improve software reliability, delivery confidence and customer experience at scale.
• Remote working: Work remotely in a principal-level role without moving into people management.

If you're ready to shape how an engineering organisation approaches quality at scale, we'd love to hear from you. Apply now with a CV to Dominic Brown on [email protected] or get in touch for a confidential discussion about the opportunity.