QA Engineer

Job Title: QA Engineer

Location: Cardiff (office-based role, 3 days per week)

Salary: £45,000 - £50,000 per annum

Reporting to: Head of Engineering

The role

We're seeking a hands-on QA Engineer to join a small but growing QA team at a small SME business based in Cardiff. Youll play a critical role in how they test, release, and improve a well-established SaaS platform in the global banking industry. This is an opportunity to go beyond standard testing and gain exposure to modern architecture, release pipelines, and the inner workings of a high-demand product used by major blue-chip clients.

You'll have the confidence and responsibility to stop a deployment if the quality isn't there, and the curiosity to understand how the system fits together behind the scenes.

Key Responsibilities

• Pick up tickets from Jira and test against criteria, edge cases, and business logic
• Actively try to break the feature before it reaches users
• Raise bugs clearly and concisely, escalating where needed
• Say no to a deployment if the product isn't ready, whether it's functionality, quality, or risk.
• Maintain and run regression packs to catch anything that's slipped through
• Conduct full smoke testing before and after deployments
• Test in both UAT and production, confirming real-world stability and user readiness
• Create practical test plans and QA workflows for repeatable coverage
• Learn how the product is built: gain exposure to system architecture, how services interact, and how infrastructure supports delivery
• Contribute to better release reliability and decision-making through increased technical awareness
• Use low-code automation tools to optimise repetitive testing where possible
• Run load/performance tests as needed and support live service assurance
• Own testing for data migrations, ensuring reusable, reliable coverage

Experience needed

• Detailed experience in manual testing
• Confident testing to break things before users do!
• Familiarity with Jira for ticket management and test tracking
• Practical experience with regression testing, smoke tests, and UAT
• Clear understanding of when to raise a blocker and stop a release
• Excellent documentation and communication skills
• A genuine curiosity to understand how systems work, not just how they behave

Nice to Have

• Exposure to test automation (low-code or traditional)
• Experience in Agile delivery teams
• Familiarity with SaaS platforms, data migrations, or production testing

Why This Role?

This is more than a routine testing role. Youll be working with a great bunch of people with a respected product used by well-known client businesses that expect reliability, speed and attention to detail.

You'll be trusted to make quality decisions, gain deep insight into how the product is built, and enjoy the kind of hands-on experience that's hard to come by in larger teams.

Readiness Test Automation SME Pipelines Assurance Manual Testing Regression Testing Agile Load Salary Attention To Detail Decision-Making Reliability Architecture Communication Skills Banking Infrastructure Automation JIRA Documentation Testing Engineering Business Communication Management