Senior/Lead QA Engineer – Contract

About the role

SalesApe is looking for a Senior/Lead QA Engineer on a contract basis to own quality across its fast‑moving AI product suite. You will build and scale the QA function from the ground up, setting the quality bar, driving automation, and helping the team move toward continuous delivery safely.

Key responsibilities

• Own the end‑to‑end QA strategy, from risk triage to automation implementation.
• Design and implement a scalable QA process tailored for small, fast‑moving teams.
• Set the quality bar required to ship to production safely at a high cadence.
• Automate integration, end‑to‑end and regression testing across the Django and NextJS stack.
• Apply AI techniques to QA, such as test case generation, diffing or log analysis.
• Collaborate closely with product engineers and prototypers to balance speed and safety.

Required profile

• Proven experience standing up QA functions or frameworks in early‑stage teams at a senior or lead level.
• Fluency with AI‑assisted development and testing approaches.
• Ability to prioritise testing pragmatically, balancing risk versus velocity.
• Strong knowledge of QA tooling such as Playwright, Pytest or Cypress.
• Comfortable working across a full‑stack environment (backend APIs, front‑end UIs, async jobs).
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD pipelines, preferably GitHub Actions.
• Clear communicator who collaborates well with engineers and product leads.

Required skills

• Playwright
• Pytest
• Cypress
• Django
• NextJS
• GitHub Actions
• Python
• React
• factory_boy
• coverage.py

What we offer

• A foundational role helping the team move from weekly to continuous delivery.
• The opportunity to shape how AI is integrated into the testing strategy.
• A high‑trust, low‑ego team focused on fast iteration.
• A funded, product‑led startup at an exciting inflection point.
• Freedom and autonomy as principal values.
• Contract role – 3‑month initial term, rolling monthly thereafter, with a rate equivalent to £75k per annum.