Senior Quality Engineer

Senior Quality Engineer Apply At Smart, our mission is to transform retirement, savings and financial wellbeing, across all generations, around the world. THE ROLE We aren’t looking for a "tester" to catch bugs at the end of a sprint. We are looking for a Quality Engineer who acts as a quality multiplier for our frontend engineering teams (working across more than one squad). Your goal is to move the needle from "testing as a phase" to "quality as a standard." You will be the bridge between rapid UI iteration and bulletproof reliability. By focusing on quality coaching, architectural testability, and a "contract-first" mindset, you will enable our teams to deploy with high confidence, even when the backend is a moving target or unavailable (as a test reference). Key Pillars of the Role: Influence & Cultural Coaching Shift-Left Evangelism: Partner with Product and Tech Leads early in the discovery phase to identify edge cases before a single line of code is written. Quality Mentorship: Coach developers on writing meaningful, low-flake tests. You don’t just find bugs; you teach the team how to architect code that prevents them. The "Quality Mindset": Advocate for a culture where quality is a shared responsibility, not a hand-off. You’ll question the status quo and push for "Quality over Coverage." Infrastructure & Tooling (The "Enabler") Agnostic Delivery: Build and maintain sophisticated mocking and service virtualization strategies (e.g., Pact or similar) to ensure the frontend can be developed, tested, and demoed independently of backend availability. Pipeline Optimisation: Own the teams’ CI/CD feedback loop. You’ll ensure that our pipelines are fast, deterministic, and provide actionable signals, not just a wall of red text. Testing Modernisation: Maintain and extend next-gen tools (Playwright, Visual Regression) that align with a modern component-based architecture. Strategic Delivery Contract Testing: Implement and champion Consumer-Driven Contracts to ensure frontend and backend stay in sync without requiring heavy integrated environments. Observability in QA: Shift your focus from "did it pass?" to "how is it performing?" Using synthetics and error tracking to inform your testing strategy. Risk-Based Strategy: Use data to decide where to automate and where to explore, ensuring we spend our energy on the features that matter most to users, and ensure our SLAs are achieved. WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR The skills, experience, and aptitudes we are looking for are listed below but please don’t be discouraged from applying if you don’t meet every single one of these criteria – having a ‘can do’ attitude is sometimes more important than being able to tick every box: Technical Chops - Deep experience / understanding of the modern JS ecosystem (React, Vue, or Next.js) and how to test it. Architectural Thinking - You understand how component libraries impact quality at scale. Communication - The ability to persuade a skeptical developer why a specific architectural change will improve long-term velocity. Bravery - You aren't afraid to stop a release if the process is broken, but you’d rather fix the process so the release never has to stop. WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT You won't be siloed in a "QA Department." You will be embedded in the heart of delivery. We give you the agency to blow up legacy testing patterns and replace them with lean, modern, and highly-automated workflows. If you believe that speed is a byproduct of quality, we want to talk to you. WHAT SUCCESS IN 6 MONTHS LOOKS LIKE Frontend teams can run a full suite of meaningful tests without a backend connection, and be confident in its quality. "Flaky tests" have been eradicated through better infrastructure and developer education. The team is deploying to production multiple times a day with a "Green Build" that they actually trust. WHO WE ARE We work in partnerships with governments and financial institutions in the UK and internationally. Our cloud-native digital platform is revolutionising how people around the world think about, and save for, their retirement. At heart, we’re a financial technology business. What we do is all about innovation, and using the power of digital change to put the customer first. Our Engineers will tell you that working at Smart gives you the opportunity to play your part in developing world-class technological solutions, working with – and learning from – like-minded people. You’ll also find that, across our business, our colleagues love Smart’s culture, and how what we do means better financial outcomes for savers. That feels worthwhile, and it means that what we do, collectively, goes way beyond the nine to five of a typical working day. Don’t just take our word for it – you can see what our colleagues say about working at Smart on LinkedIn Life and Glassdoor . BENEFITS At Smart, one of the eight principles we work to is “We want happy and good people in our team”. We created a list of benefits that helps us achieve this goal: 26 days’ of paid holiday per year + Polish bank holidays 2250 PLN annual training budget to spend on your professional development Health insurance (including dental care) via TU Inter MultiSport Plus Gym Card Online English lessons during working hours Sick leave in accordance with Polish labour law Paternity and maternity leave in accordance with Polish labour law Additional employer contribution to the Employee Capital Plans (PPK) of 2.5% Death in service insurance cover Fully-paid five-week sabbatical after five years of employment In the Krakow office wellbeing services, such as manicures, massages and barbers At Smart, we are committed to creating an inclusive and equitable workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to do their best work. We believe that diverse perspectives help us lead the way in transforming retirement, savings, and financial wellbeing. We welcome differences in background, experience, thinking, and identity, and we recognise that innovation is strongest when it is built on inclusion and fairness. We encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and experiences and do not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process or in the workplace, we encourage you to let us know - we are committed to supporting you. We think Smart is an awesome place to work. If it sounds like somewhere you’d like to work, too, and if you’re ready to play your part in our continued success in the future, then naturally we’d love to meet you. Department Engineering Locations Krakow Remote status Hybrid About Smart Pension Our mission is to transform retirement, savings and financial wellbeing, across all generations, around the world. Founded in 2012 Co-workers 400