Senior QA Engineer at Nando's UK & IRE, Remote, 12 Months, £Contract Rate (Outside IR35)

Senior QA Engineer (Contract) – USA Tech Team

Contract Details

Contract Length: Initial 12-month contract

IR35 Status: Outside IR35

Location: Hybrid / Remote (UK)

This is an opportunity to join Nando's USA Technology team on a long-term contract, helping build and scale the digital products that support our expansion across the USA. You'll help ensure quality is built into every stage of delivery, working alongside engineers, Product Managers and Designers to deliver reliable, high-performing digital experiences within a collaborative, agile environment.

Overall Ambition

Help deliver exceptional digital experiences for Nando's customers across the USA by embedding quality throughout every stage of software delivery.

You'll join a fast-moving engineering team, ensuring quality is considered from discovery through to production by combining thoughtful test strategy, intelligent automation and hands-on exploratory testing across modern web and mobile applications.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer to join our USA Technology team on an initial 12-month contract.

You'll be an experienced Quality Engineer who can quickly understand complex systems, establish effective testing strategies and contribute from day one within a fast-paced agile environment.

You'll enjoy partnering with Software Engineers, Product Managers and Designers to build quality into products rather than simply testing them at the end of the development lifecycle.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys solving complex quality challenges through automation, exploratory testing and continuous improvement whilst helping the wider team ship software with confidence.

The Role

As a Senior QA Engineer, you'll be responsible for embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle across customer-facing digital products that power the Nando's experience throughout the USA.

You'll work closely with Front End Engineers, Backend Engineers, Product Managers, UX Designers and Technical Leads to ensure every release is reliable, performant, accessible and production-ready.

You'll help shape the team's quality practices whilst remaining hands-on across automation, exploratory testing, release validation and production quality.

You'll also:

• Build quality into every stage of product delivery.
• Define test strategies for new features and product initiatives.
• Design, develop and maintain automated UI and API test suites.
• Perform exploratory, regression, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Collaborate closely with engineers throughout development to improve testability.
• Identify, document and drive defects through to resolution.
• Ensure releases meet quality, accessibility and performance standards.
• Champion shift-left testing and continuous quality improvement.
• Champion the effective use of AI-assisted engineering tools to improve testing efficiency whilst maintaining engineering quality.

About the USA Tech Team

Our team's objective is to bring the same high-quality digital experience that customers enjoy in the UK and Ireland to customers across the USA.

To achieve this, we build and evolve the services powering our customer journeys across:

• Locate
• Menu
• Payments
• Orders
• Loyalty
• Identity
• Web & Mobile Applications

As a Senior QA Engineer, you'll play a key role in ensuring these customer journeys remain reliable, scalable and resilient.

You'll work alongside Software Engineers, Product Managers and Designers to build quality into every release whilst helping the team continuously improve engineering standards.

Responsibilities

You'll:

• Define quality strategies for new features and product initiatives.
• Create and maintain scalable automated UI, API and end-to-end test suites.
• Execute exploratory, regression, integration and acceptance testing where appropriate.
• Work closely with engineers to improve testability and automation coverage.
• Identify, document and manage defects through to resolution.
• Validate customer journeys across multiple browsers, devices and platforms.
• Ensure accessibility, usability and performance standards are maintained.
• Contribute automated testing into CI/CD deployment pipelines.
• Support production releases through validation and post-release verification.
• Analyse production issues using monitoring and observability tools.
• Participate in sprint planning, refinement and team ceremonies.
• Promote quality engineering best practices across the team.
• Continuously explore emerging technologies, including AI-assisted software testing, to improve engineering effectiveness.

Skills Required

Essential

• Significant commercial experience as a Software QA Engineer, Quality Engineer or SDET.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining automated UI and API test suites.
• Experience with modern browser automation frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress or Selenium.
• Experience testing REST APIs using Postman, Insomnia or similar tools.
• Strong manual exploratory, regression and end-to-end testing experience.
• Experience working with JSON payloads, API responses and network debugging.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong understanding of Agile software delivery and modern SDLC practices.
• Excellent defect investigation and root cause analysis skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across engineering and product teams.
• Ability to quickly understand existing products and contribute with minimal onboarding.
• Experience using AI tools to improve testing productivity and software quality.

Highly Desirable

• Experience testing React and React Native applications.
• Experience using Maestro for mobile test automation.
• Experience with BrowserStack or similar real-device testing platforms.
• Experience with visual regression testing using Percy.
• Experience with performance testing tools such as k6, Gatling or equivalent.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Experience working with Grafana, LogRocket or similar observability platforms.
• Accessibility testing (WCAG).
• Experience working on customer-facing, high-scale digital platforms.