Senior QA Engineer

Senior QA Engineer - Job Description

Location: Belfast, Northern Ireland · Full-time

About The Position

Upwind is a next-generation Cloud Security Platform that leverages runtime context to identify and prioritize critical risks, providing precise insights and efficient cloud security management. Unlike traditional tools, Upwind uses runtime data proactively for risk prioritization and posture insights, ensuring teams focus on what truly matters. With industry-leading efficiency and eBPF-powered sensors, Upwind delivers comprehensive capabilities, including agentless cloud posture discovery, real-time threat protection, and integrated API security. From misconfigurations to malware defense, Upwind ensures end-to-end, cost-effective cloud infrastructure protection. At Upwind, you'll have the opportunity to think creatively, explore new ideas, and use your skills to make a meaningful impact on our growth.

We are looking for an experienced Senior QA Engineer to lead testing across several of our engineering teams in Belfast. This is a hands-on engineering role: writes test code every week, the person in it builds and maintains test frameworks, and sets the standard for how the teams around them test their own work. Spanning back-end services in Golang and Java and front-end applications in React TS, the teams build distributed scanning systems across all major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle), running on Kubernetes, Docker, Neo4j, ElasticSearch, Redis, TimescaleDB, RabbitMQ, and more.

Responsibilities

• Designing, building and maintaining test frameworks and tooling for services, APIs and the user interface, and keeping them fast, reliable and easy for engineers to extend
• Working with teams to create test strategies and deciding what is tested at which level (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end) so that most coverage sits below the user interface
• Integrating automated tests into continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines as quality gates, and treating flaky or slow tests as defects to be fixed
• Advocating for testing best practice, and writing the standards, examples and documentation that teams adopt as their default
• Teaching engineers testing concepts, frameworks and techniques through pairing, code review, workshops and written guides
• Reviewing test code and production code with a testing lens, and giving clear, constructive feedback that raises the quality of both
• Working with engineers to make services testable in isolation: interface contracts, test data, ephemeral environments and known-correct expected results
• Building test data sets and cloud test environments that let us verify the accuracy of security findings, not only that the code runs
• Contributing to performance, load and reliability testing, and helping teams define measurable quality targets
• Measuring and reporting on quality (escaped defects, test coverage, pipeline stability) and using the results to decide where to invest next
• Interfacing with other teams (e.g. Backend, Frontend, DevOps, Product, Customer Success) to reproduce customer issues, agree acceptance criteria and deliver best-in-class features

We operate on a hybrid working model, with three days per week in our impressive Custom House Square offices (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays) and the remaining days working remotely.

Requirements

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science/Software Engineering or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of experience in software testing, quality engineering or software development in test, including at least 2 years leading test strategy for a team or product area
• 2+ years of experience with browser end-to-end testing (e.g. Playwright, Cypress)
• Strong programming skills in at least one high-level language (ideally Golang, Java, Python or TypeScript), with test code written and reviewed to the same standard as production code
• Experience testing backend services and APIs (REST, gRPC or event-driven), including integration and contract testing
• Experience with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) and with running tests in containerised environments (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with cloud platforms and products (e.g. AWS, GCP and Azure)
• Experience with microservices based architecture and data-intensive systems (databases, event systems, messaging systems, etc)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Experience standing up a test automation framework from scratch and maintaining it as the product and the team grew is an advantage
• Experience of teaching testing practice to engineers and influencing teams you do not manage is an advantage
• Experience with performance or load testing tools (e.g. k6, Gatling, JMeter) is an advantage
• Background in cybersecurity, cloud security or testing detection systems is an advantage

Equal Opportunity Statement

Upwind is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, genetic information, citizenship status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Applicants with disabilities may also request reasonable accommodation at any stage of the hiring process.