QA Lead Engineer — Scientific SaaS / Biopharma
Remote: EU/UK based
We are supporting a search for a Senior QA Lead Engineer to join a growing scientific software organisation as it continues bringing its engineering capability fully in-house.
This is a particularly important hire for the business. Rather than stepping into an established QA function with mature processes already in place, this person will have the opportunity to define how quality is approached across the organisation from the ground up.
The company develops a technically complex SaaS platform combining software, AI, scientific modelling, and bioprocess expertise. As the platform and engineering organisation continue to scale, there is a need for someone who can take ownership not only of testing, but of the wider quality strategy: test architecture, release governance, CI/CD quality gates, quality metrics, scientific validation, and the behaviours that make quality a shared responsibility across engineering.
This is therefore much broader than a traditional Senior QA position.
The successful person will operate across engineering, product, and science, translating complex or ambiguous requirements into measurable acceptance criteria and robust test strategies. They will have the authority and judgement to determine what good looks like, what needs to be tested, how releases should be governed, and where unacceptable risk remains.
A particularly interesting part of the role is the scientific and data-driven nature of the platform. Quality cannot be measured only through conventional UI or API testing. The Lead will need to establish approaches around golden datasets, deterministic reproducibility, cross-system reconciliation, and validation of scientific and computational outputs, working closely with subject-matter experts to ensure the platform remains scientifically correct as it evolves.
The role will also have significant influence over engineering culture. The objective is not to create a QA team that becomes the final checkpoint before every release. Instead, this person will help move quality further into the development lifecycle, strengthen testing practices across engineering, and create an environment where developers take greater ownership of quality themselves.
The role will focus on:
- Defining the QA strategy, processes, standards, and release-readiness criteria as the engineering organisation develops in-house
- Establishing quality gates across pull requests, staging, pre-release, and production delivery
- Building scalable QA workflows, templates, tooling, and documentation
- Defining the long-term test architecture for a distributed, microservices-based SaaS platform
- Making framework and tooling decisions with long-term maintainability and scalability in mind
- Establishing contract-testing strategies between services
- Defining how integration boundaries, failure modes, environments, and distributed workflows should be tested
- Translating ambiguous requirements from product managers and scientists into measurable acceptance criteria
- Challenging requirements that are not sufficiently testable and helping teams establish a clear definition of done
- Defining meaningful quality metrics covering areas such as escaped defects, test flakiness, automation effectiveness, coverage, and resolution times
- Providing clear reporting on release confidence and outstanding quality risk to the leadership team
- Building an ongoing view of platform quality rather than relying on reactive reporting
- Owning validation strategy for scientific and data-driven workflows
- Establishing golden datasets, reference outputs, and deterministic reproducibility practices
- Managing validation and versioning of external or reference datasets
- Building cross-system reconciliation testing across services, data pipelines, and digital-twin models
- Owning the CI/CD pipeline from a quality perspective, including test execution, environment management, gating logic, and pipeline reliability
- Improving test signal while reducing pipeline flakiness and unnecessary runtime
- Leading root-cause analysis for significant defects and production incidents
- Running postmortems and ensuring corrective actions are actually implemented
- Feeding recurring failure patterns back into quality gates and test strategy
- Driving quality further left across engineering and increasing developer ownership of testing
- Mentoring engineers on test design and quality practices
- Representing QA in roadmap, planning, and prioritisation discussions
- Selecting and evolving QA tooling as the function grows
- Owning go/no-go recommendations for releases and communicating those decisions clearly to senior leadership
We are looking for someone with:
- Ideally 8+ years of relevant QA, test engineering, or software-quality experience
- Proven experience establishing QA processes, standards, and release governance within a growing engineering organisation
- Ideally experience building a QA capability from an early-stage or 0-to-1 position
- Strong experience designing test architecture for complex, distributed, or microservices-based systems
- Experience with contract testing and service-level integration strategies
- Deep experience with UI and API test automation
- Experience taking ownership of CI/CD quality gates and release logic
- Strong ability to convert ambiguous product or scientific requirements into testable acceptance criteria
- Experience defining quality metrics that support genuine engineering and business decisions
- Experience testing data-driven, scientific, computational, or otherwise technically complex software
- Strong Python or JavaScript skills for test frameworks, tooling, and automation
- Experience with tools such as PyTest, Cypress, Selenium, Playwright, Postman, Pact, or similar
- Experience with SQL and database validation
- Experience with performance and load testing
- Experience with cloud environments, containers, Kubernetes, and modern deployment workflows
- Familiarity with observability platforms such as Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent technologies
- Strong communication skills with both engineers and executive stakeholders
- The judgement and confidence to make and defend ship/no-ship recommendations
- The ability to influence quality practices across teams without needing formal authority over every engineer
- A pragmatic leadership style that combines technical depth, strong ownership, and effective stakeholder management
Experience within regulated software environments such as GxP or GAMP 5 would be valuable, as would previous experience building QA within a startup, scale-up, or organisation bringing engineering capabilities in-house.
This is a strong opportunity for someone who wants to move beyond ownership of individual testing activities and take responsibility for how an organisation thinks about quality as a whole. You will have the opportunity to establish the function, influence engineering architecture and culture, define release governance, and build the quality framework required to support the next stage of the platform’s development.
Apply here or if you know someone from your network, please let me know.
