Senior QA Engineer
Job Summary
Music is Universal
Its the passionate and dedicated team at Universal Music who help make us the worlds leading music company. From A&R to finance legal to digital sales to marketing Universal Music is the place to grow and develop your career within a truly commercial and innovative business that leads in everything it does.
Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles and we are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of gender race disability sexual orientation religion belief age marital status background pregnancy or caring responsibilities. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought within our teams and are fully committed to embracing the talents of people with autism dyslexia ADHD and other forms of neurocognitive variation.
We will always seek to make appropriate adjustments to recruitment workplaces and work processes to be fully inclusive to people with different needs and working styles. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments for you from application onwards including alternatives to the online form or to disclose a neurocognitive condition please email
Core Skills
A senior QA engineer should act as a quality leader mentor and strategic contributor across delivery teams.
Strong ownership of overall product or platform quality
Ability to define QA strategy test approach and release quality standards
Excellent analytical and critical-thinking skills
Strong communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
Ability to influence engineering teams without relying on authority
Confidence challenging requirements and delivery plans where quality risks exist
Strong risk-based decision-making
Ability to balance delivery speed with quality maintainability security and scalability
Mentoring and coaching of junior and mid-level QA engineers
Ability to lead defect triage root-cause analysis and continuous improvement activities
Strong stakeholder management across product engineering architecture DevOps and delivery teams
Ability to translate business requirements into testable acceptance criteria
Strong facilitation skills in refinement planning retrospectives and release readiness discussions
Proactive approach to identifying gaps in process tooling environments and automation coverage
Ability to promote a shared quality mindset across the team
Strong documentation skills for test strategies automation standards release risks and quality reports
Comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs in complex delivery environments
Ability to support high-quality delivery of solutions that are fit for purpose maintainable robust scalable and secure
Technical Skills
Test Automation & Strategy
Strong experience designing building and maintaining test automation frameworks
Ability to select appropriate tools for UI API integration contract performance and end-to-end testing
Strong programming ability in C# JavaScript TypeScript or another relevant automation language
Deep understanding of automation patterns such as Page Object Model Screenplay API client abstraction test fixtures reusable test data builders and service mocks
Ability to design automation that is scalable maintainable reliable and suitable for CI/CD
Experience reducing flaky tests and improving automation execution speed
Ability to define automation standards coding guidelines and review test code
UI Testing
Good understanding of web application testing especially Angular-based applications
Experience testing UI behaviour forms validation routing authentication flows and browser compatibility
Ability to write or maintain automated UI tests using tools such as Playwright Cypress Selenium or similar
Basic understanding of HTML CSS JavaScript and browser developer tools
Ability to define frontend test coverage across unit component integration UI and end-to-end layers
Experience testing complex user journeys state management routing validation authentication and accessibility
Ability to advise on testability improvements in frontend code
API Testing
Experience testing REST APIs
Strong knowledge of REST API testing including authentication authorisation routing middleware behaviour configuration validation and error handling
Good understanding of C# application architecture
Ability to test service boundaries integrations retries failure modes and resilience patterns
Ability to contribute to test strategy for micro-services and distributed systems
Ability to use tools such as Postman Swagger Insomnia or REST-assured-style frameworks
Ability to validate API contracts error handling edge cases and integration points
Experience with contract testing service virtualisation mocking and stubbing
Cloud DevOps CI/CD & Version Control
Experience using cloud platforms such as AWS Azure or Google Cloud
Ability to test applications deployed to cloud-based environments
Understanding of configuration differences across dev test staging and production-like environments
Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines
Ability to define quality gates in GitHub Actions Azure Pipelines AWS pipelines or similar
Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes from a testing and deployment perspective
Database Data Testing
Strong SQL skills for test data setup validation and investigation
Experience testing systems that use Redis Elasticsearch or other NoSQL technologies
Ability to test caching indexing search accuracy data consistency and data migration scenarios
Ability to design robust test data strategies across integrated environments
Quality Engineering Practices
Strong understanding of test design techniques including boundary value analysis equivalence partitioning decision tables and exploratory testing
Ability to create clear test cases test scenarios and acceptance criteria
Understanding of Agile delivery and working within Scrum or Kanban teams
About UMG UK
We are Universal Music Group UK the UKs leading music-based entertainment company. We exist to shape culture through the power of artistry. We help UK artists produce distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to inspire and entertain fans at home and around the world.
Bonus Tracks: Your Benefits
Group Personal Pension Scheme (between 3% and 9%)
Private Medical Insurance
25 paid days of annual leave
Interest Free Season Ticket Loan
Holiday Purchase scheme
Dental and Travel Insurance options
Cycle to Work Scheme
Salary Sacrifice Cars
Subsidised Gym Membership
Employee Discounts (Reward Gateway)
Just So You Know
The company presents this job description as a guide to the major areas and duties for which the jobholder is accountable. However the business operates in an environment that demands change and the jobholders specific responsibilities and activities will vary and develop. Therefore the job description should be seen as indicative and not as a permanent definitive and exhaustive statement.
Job Category:
Required Experience:
Senior IC