Test Engineer

Test Engineer (Manual & Automation) | AI Start-up

Bristol or London | Hybrid, 2 to 3 days in the office |

Most AI coding tools stop at generating snippets and leave you with a tangle of code nobody wants to maintain.

This company has taken on a harder problem. Their platform works more like an architect than an autocomplete. It orchestrates proven, enterprise-grade components across the frontend, backend and database to build production-ready applications in React and Node. Developers keep full-stack control and own their code outright, with no vendor lock-in. That walled garden is the thing that has held back low-code platforms for years.

It's built for teams too. A multi-layered, event-driven architecture lets several people work on the same project at once. Users can launch and publish what they build, with a database behind it, and bring colleagues from across their business onto the platform.

The company is 17 people, backed by industry veterans, and past the point most start-ups never reach: the beta is live and customers are paying for it.

The role

You'll be the first dedicated tester in the business. The developers have built a good amount of automation, and a contractor laid much of the groundwork, so you'll have a foundation to start from. What's missing is a specialist who can get hands-on, explore the product properly and find what the automated suite misses. That's where you'll begin.

Longer term, you'll own quality across the platform. That means shaping the automation strategy, building frameworks and embedding testing into CI. It's a greenfield role in a growing business, with real scope to build a QA function and grow with it.

This isn't a conventional product to test. You'll be validating an AI engine that generates full-stack software on the fly. You'll need to work out how to get confidence in outputs that won't be identical twice, while also testing real-time, multi-user behaviour.

What you'll be doing

• Leading manual and exploratory testing across the platform, from prompt to published app
• Testing the AI's generated output for correctness, consistency and reliability, and developing approaches for non-deterministic behaviour
• Testing concurrent, multi-user collaboration and the event-driven flows behind it
• Validating the full stack of generated apps: React frontends, Node backends and the databases behind them
• Taking ownership of the existing automation, extending it and building frameworks that will last
• Embedding automated testing into the CI pipeline
• Working closely with developers and product to define what quality looks like as the platform scales

What we're looking for

• Strong manual and exploratory testing experience, with a sharp eye for edge cases
• Hands-on automation experience and the ambition to build frameworks, not just maintain them
• Experience testing web applications, ideally with exposure to React and/or Node
• Familiarity with CI/CD and integrating tests into a pipeline
• Comfort being the only tester in a fast-moving start-up: self-directed, pragmatic and happy to set the standard

Nice to have

• Experience testing AI, ML or LLM-powered products
• Knowledge of frameworks such as Playwright or Cypress
• Experience testing real-time, collaborative or event-driven systems

What's on offer

• Share options in a post-revenue AI start-up
• A greenfield role with real scope to build and lead a QA function
• Hybrid working from Bristol or London, 2 to 3 days in the office
• Work at the leading edge of AI-driven software development, alongside an experienced team

If you'd rather define how AI-built software gets tested than test yesterday's products, apply now or drop me a message for a confidential chat.