About the Role
Particle41 is seeking a QA Engineer (IC2) to join our engineering team. We're looking for someone who sees quality as more than testing; someone who takes ownership of the overall customer experience and works closely with engineers and product teams to build reliable, high-quality software.
In this role, you'll be involved from the early stages of development through production release, helping identify risks, refine acceptance criteria, shape test strategy, and ensure features are thoroughly validated before and after deployment. You'll play an active role in improving team quality practices, raising concerns proactively, and using modern AI-assisted testing approaches to improve efficiency and coverage.
If you are passionate about building quality into software from the start -not just validating it at the end; we want to hear from you.
Responsibilities
Test Planning and Strategy
- Engage with requirements and acceptance criteria before development begins, identifying gaps, ambiguities, and edge cases early.
- Contribute to design and refinement discussions to flag testability and quality risks while they are still cheap to fix.
- Collaborate with stakeholders to define test objectives, scope, and approach aligned to project milestones.
Test Automation
- Write and maintain automated test suites spanning UI, API, contract, and integration layers using TypeScript and Puppeteer (or equivalent tools).
- Contribute to framework improvements and scaling of automation coverage across the feature area.
AI-Augmented Testing
- Use AI tooling consistently for test design, test data generation, edge-case identification, and debugging and critically evaluate AI outputs before incorporating them.
- Stay current with evolving AI testing tools and advocate for their adoption where they improve coverage or efficiency.
- Adopt AI for test design, data generation, and debugging with guidance and critically evaluate AI outputs before incorporating them where you're building the foundation to progress toward IC3, where AI is used to expand coverage, triage issues, and improve test efficiency across the release.
Security and Accessibility Testing
- Run security testing tools and a11y checks; interpret and report findings, applying OWASP Top 10 and basic manual accessibility validation (keyboard, contrast, screen reader).
CI/CD Quality Gates and Shift-Right Monitoring
- Maintain quality gates in the CI/CD pipeline and ensure automated suites run reliably on every build.
- Monitor production alerts and dashboards post-deployment; own post-deploy validation to confirm releases meet quality expectations.
Defect Identification and Reporting
- Document defects with detailed descriptions, reproduction steps, expected vs actual results, and severity classification.
- Collaborate with development teams to investigate, troubleshoot, and verify defect resolutions against acceptance criteria.
Quality Metrics and Reporting
- Track, analyse, and report on feature-level quality metrics (defect escape rate, test coverage, automation pass rates); maintain well-organised test documentation for team and stakeholder access.
- Translate quality findings into customer-impact language, what's broken for users, who feels it first, and what changes when we fix it -not just defect counts, test pass rates, or coverage numbers.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Actively participate in sprint planning, refinement, and stand-ups, raising quality and testability risks early in each cycle.
- Partner with product managers, developers, and DevOps to ensure quality is built in across the delivery lifecycle, not bolted on at the end.
- Support the onboarding of junior QA team members and share knowledge and best practices across the team.
Skills and Experience
Required
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field with 3–8 years of experience in software quality engineering in a fast-paced development environment.
- Hands-on experience with TypeScript, Puppeteer, and third-party API integration.
- Demonstrated ability to write automated test suites across UI, API, contract, and integration layers.
- Experience working in CI/CD environments; familiarity with maintaining quality gates and reading pipeline output.
- Working knowledge of OWASP Top 10 and experience running security testing tools.
- Experience with accessibility tooling and manual a11y validation techniques.
- Strong understanding of SDLC, STLC, and agile/scrum methodologies.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to report quality risk clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated use of AI tooling to support test design, data generation, or debugging.
Nice to Have
- Experience with cross-browser and cross-platform testing.
- Experience mentoring or supporting junior QA engineers.
- Familiarity with observability tooling and production monitoring dashboards.
Certifications
- ISTQB Advanced — Test Analyst or Technical Test Analyst (strongly recommended)
- Postman API Certification (valued)
- Selenium / Playwright / Cypress certification; ISTQB Specialist — AI Testing or Security Tester (valued)
Culture We Hire
QEs who live Particle41's ELITE values - Empowering, Leadership, Innovation, Teamwork, Excellence. In practice, that means taking initiative on quality risk, collaborating across functions with empathy, embracing new tools (including AI), and treating excellence as a baseline rather than an aspiration.
Career Growth
This role is aligned with an IC2-level scope and expectations. Strong contributors who consistently demonstrate expanded ownership and cross-team impact will be supported in progressing toward IC3 (Senior QA Engineer), where the focus expands to release-level quality strategy and systems thinking.
