Principal Test Engineer

About the role

Principal Test Engineer taking ownership of quality across the portfolio. You'll set the strategy and lead the team, but you'll also be in the codebase building and maintaining the automation frameworks the team relies on. You'll be the person the business turns to for a straight answer on release readiness, and the person the engineers turn to when the pipeline goes red.

Key responsibilities

• Define and own the test strategy across functional, integration, regression, performance and non-functional testing
• Design, build and maintain automation frameworks across UI, API and data layers and keep them maintainable as the estate grows
• Embed automated quality gates into CI/CD pipelines so testing runs continuously, not at the end
• Plan and manage test delivery across concurrent projects: scope, estimates, resourcing, sequencing and risk
• Lead, mentor and grow a team of test engineers, including capability uplift, performance conversations and hiring
• Partner with engineering leads, product owners, delivery managers and business stakeholders, report clearly on coverage, defect trends, quality risk and go/no-go decisions
• Set the standards for test data management, environment strategy, defect triage and entry/exit criteria
• Drive continuous improvement by shift testing left, reduce manual regression effort, shorten release cycles

About you

• 10+ years in software testing, with at least 3 in a principal, lead or test manager capacity
• Demonstrated experience building automation frameworks from the ground up and not just maintaining someone else's
• Strong hands-on coding in at least one of Java / Python / JavaScript / TypeScript / C#
• Depth across modern tooling like Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, RestAssured, Postman, pytest, JUnit or equivalent
• Solid CI/CD experience (Azure DevOps / GitLab / Jenkins / GitHub Actions) and comfort with containers and cloud environments
• Track record managing test delivery in Agile and hybrid delivery models
• Genuine stakeholder management skill, you can hold a room of senior stakeholders and translate quality risk into commercial language
• People leadership experience: coaching, mentoring, and building a team's capability over time
• Nice to have: performance testing (JMeter / k6 / Gatling), security testing fundamentals, data and ETL testing, mobile testing, ISTQB Advanced certification