01Owns
Test strategy
Maps features by business risk and change frequency, decides what belongs in unit, API, end-to-end and manual testing, and writes it down.
Hire · Quality engineering
Hire QA Engineers
Senior QA engineers who join your team to decide what needs testing, automate the checks that pay back and explore the product the way real users break it. Shortlisted engineers have written a risk-based test plan, stabilised a flaky Playwright suite and logged defects from an exploratory session, all in a paid trial.
Trial covers strategy, automation and exploration
Senior and lead levels only
Web, mobile and API testing
On your team
What a QA engineer owns on your team.
02Owns
Automation suites
Builds Playwright tests for web and Appium or native frameworks for mobile, with stable selectors, isolated data and readable failures.
03Owns
Exploratory testing
Runs time-boxed sessions with charters around risky areas, records what was covered and finds the bugs scripted tests miss.
04Owns
Release gates
Agrees which checks block a release, keeps the gate fast enough that nobody bypasses it and signs off with evidence.
05Owns
Device and browser matrix
Chooses browsers, OS versions and devices from your real traffic, and runs them on device clouds or emulators as appropriate.
Coverage should follow risk, not screens
Teams new to QA often ask for every screen to be tested. That produces large, slow suites that still miss the defects that cost money. A strong QA engineer starts by asking where failure would hurt most, such as payments, permissions and data loss, and concentrates effort there.
In interviews, give candidates a feature and ask what they would deliberately not test. Their answer shows whether they can prioritise or only enumerate.
Vetting
Skills we test before a QA engineer joins.
01Tested
Risk-based prioritisation
Weighs impact and likelihood to decide what gets deep coverage, and explains why some areas receive only a smoke test.
02Tested
Playwright
Locators by role and label, auto-waiting, fixtures, network mocking, traces for debugging and parallel runs in CI.
03Tested
Mobile testing
Appium, Espresso or XCUITest, permission and interruption scenarios, offline behaviour and upgrade paths between app versions.
04Tested
API testing
Contract and schema checks, authentication edge cases, idempotency and error responses tested below the interface.
05Tested
Flake diagnosis
Separates timing issues, shared test data and genuine product bugs, and quarantines rather than ignores unstable tests.
06Tested
Defect reporting
Writes reports with exact steps, environment, expected and actual results and evidence, so developers can reproduce on first read.
Work sample
How the QA engineer work sample runs.
- 01Step 1
Plan by risk
Given a checkout feature brief, the candidate writes a test plan ranking scenarios by risk and assigning each to the right layer.
- 02Step 2
Stabilise flaky tests
They receive a Playwright suite with sleeps and brittle CSS selectors, find why it fails intermittently and fix it. We pay for the session.
- 03Step 3
Explore and report
A one-hour exploratory session on a staging app with seeded defects, followed by clear bug reports ranked by severity.
- 04Step 4
Argue for a release decision
A short call where they recommend shipping or holding a release with known issues, and explain the reasoning to a product owner.
Levels
QA Engineers: what changes at each level.
01Level 1
Senior
Owns testing for a product area, maintains its automation and exploratory charters, and reviews tests written by developers.
02Level 2
Lead
Sets the test strategy, automation framework and release criteria across teams, and coaches developers on testability.
03Level 3
Quality engineering lead
Shapes how the organisation builds quality in: shift-left practices, test environments, data management and quality metrics.
Senior, lead or quality engineering lead
A senior QA engineer suits a team with some automation and a product area that needs an owner. Choose a lead when there is no agreed strategy, every team tests differently and releases are signed off on instinct. A quality engineering lead is for organisations ready to change how developers, environments and data support testing across the board.
Other options
When to hire someone other than a QA engineer.
01Consider
Releases themselves are unreliable
If tested code still breaks during deployment, a DevOps engineer should fix the release process first.
Open register02Consider
You need features built faster
If quality is acceptable and capacity is the constraint, add a full-stack developer rather than a tester.
Open register03Consider
The product is an LLM assistant
Judging model answers requires evaluation sets built by a generative AI developer, with QA supporting.
Open registerFlaky suites destroy trust
Once developers learn to rerun failed tests until they pass, the suite stops protecting anything. Candidates who can explain why a test is flaky, whether timing, shared data or a real race in the product, are worth far more than those who add retries and longer waits.
Where the first fortnight goes
Ask for a map of your riskiest user journeys and the current coverage of each. The gaps usually surprise people and give the engineer an agreed backlog.
Alongside it, have them run an exploratory session on the next release candidate. Fresh eyes find issues long-standing teams have learned to walk around.
FAQ
Questions to resolve before the build.
01Do your QA engineers write automation or test manually?
Both. Automation covers stable, high-value paths that run on every change, while exploratory testing covers new features and risky areas. The balance depends on how often your product changes.
02Which automation tools do they use?
Playwright is our default for web, and Appium, Espresso or XCUITest for mobile. If you already maintain Cypress or Selenium suites, we shortlist candidates who have worked with them.
03Will a QA engineer slow our releases down?
A good one speeds them up by catching problems earlier and making the release gate predictable. They will push back on shipping known critical issues, which is the point of having them.
Works alongside
Roles a QA engineer works best alongside.
01Pair with
DevOps engineers
To run suites in parallel inside the pipeline, provision test environments and publish traces on failure.
Open register02Pair with
React Native developers
For mobile releases where testability hooks and device-specific bugs need fixing at the source.
Open register03Pair with
UI/UX designers
To agree expected behaviour for edge cases, empty states and accessibility before testing starts.
Open registerProduct delivery
Need the whole product built instead?
Primary sources
References behind this page
Dated official documentation, standards, and research that support the factual claims on this page.
- 01Playwright documentation: Best Practices
Official guidance on resilient locators, isolation and debugging.
- 02Appium documentation
Reference for cross-platform mobile UI automation.
How to read this page
Scope, cost and timeline figures are planning guidance until confirmed in a written proposal. Diagrams and screens are illustrations, not client deliverables, and source-code rights and handover follow the signed agreement. See the delivery process and the full disclaimer.
Next decision
Turn the brief into an accepted product scope.
Define outcomes, constraints, evidence, rights and handover before delivery begins.
Commercial rights, repositories, environments, documentation, acceptance and handover remain contract-defined.