Principal Back-End Developer in QA (Backend Automation)

Location: Remote-first within the UK with occasional in-person collaboration, approximately 8 times per year, in Manchester or London offices.

Company

hirify.global is a European media business producing print and digital publishing, audio, radio, podcast, entertainment, and related content services.

What you will do

• Own backend quality strategy across APIs, services, and cloud infrastructure.
• Lead architectural design reviews, Epic breakdowns, and Testability by Design practices.
• Define Contract Driven Testing and Schema-First development using OpenAPI/Swagger as the source of truth.
• Design layered automation focused on API and service testing, with targeted Playwright/TypeScript E2E validation.
• Embed regression suites and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines and own load and performance testing strategies.
• Partner with developers, product managers, SRE/DevOps, and architects on observability, BDD, resilience, and quality practices; mentor engineers in AI-assisted testing.

Requirements

• Proven experience in a highly technical QA Automation or Backend Engineering role in a shift-left environment, including QA/testing expertise.
• Deep understanding of RESTful architectures and experience validating JSON Schemas or GraphQL types at contract level.
• Proficiency in Golang or another object-oriented language, with the ability to ramp up quickly on Go.
• Experience testing asynchronous and event-driven architectures such as Kafka or SQS, including data consistency and resilience patterns.
• Strong experience with Agile/Scrum, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI tooling effectively while critiquing, debugging, and refining AI-generated code and coaching others.
• Strong experience testing complex APIs, backend architectures, and AWS-hosted environments.
• Ability to build, maintain, and troubleshoot automated testing in CI/CD pipelines with DevOps teams.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and team-first collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Experience running load tests with k6.
• Experience transitioning teams toward an AI- and automation-first quality model.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code with Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, permanent employment with flexible, remote-first working focused on outcomes.
• 28 days of holiday, bank holidays, and 2 volunteer days.
• Access to Bauer Academy and internal training opportunities.
• Enhanced maternity/adoption, paternity, and shared parental leave pay.
• Inclusive, collaborative culture with mentoring, shared ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Visa sponsorship is not available.