Software Engineer in Test

We are looking for a Founding Lead SDET to join an impressive, fast-growing tech business with a mature, high-calibre engineering function.

Rather than walking into chaos, you’ll be joining a team that already values great engineering - they need you to step in, take ownership of Quality, and define what elite testing looks like as they scale. You’ll set the strategy, embed modern quality-first practices, and build a team around you.

No corporate ego, no rigid blueprints - just a focus on actual engineering quality, collaboration, and creativity.

🚩 Fully-remote role (UK)

What You'll Actually Be Doing

• Setting the Strategy: Defining and executing an end-to-end Quality Strategy across the engineering organization, driving a true Shift-Left mindset and embedding practices like 3 Amigos to bake quality into the architecture early.
• Building the Function: Leading by example as the founding quality lead, with a clear roadmap to hire, mentor, and grow a dedicated QA/SDET team around you.
• Core Automation & Architecture: Designing and maintaining robust, scalable automated test frameworks in Go across API (gRPC/REST), integration, performance, and reliability testing.
• Architectural Influence: Sitting in on design discussions with backend, ML, and frontend teams to ensure testability, scalability, and observability are prioritized before a line of feature code is written.

What You Need to Bring

• Golang: a degree of Go knowledge, even if not extensive experience
• Quality Leadership: Deep knowledge of modern quality engineering methodologies (Shift-Left, 3 Amigos, BDD/TDD, risk-based testing) and a proven track record of embedding them within mature engineering teams.
• APIs & Distributed Systems: Hands-on experience testing secure, high-throughput APIs (both gRPC and REST).
• Team-Building Mindset: The ability and desire to establish best practices now and scale a team of high-performing engineers in the near future.
• Nice to Have: Kubernetes, modern CI/CD/DevOps practices, or exposure to AI/GPU workloads (e.g., vLLM, KServe).

If you’re looking to shape the entire quality capability for a high-scaling tech business, work with top-tier engineers, and build out your own team, let’s have a chat.