Senior Quality Assurance Engineer

Job Description Senior QA Engineer Location: Remote / Hybrid (London or Belfast) | UK travel as required Reports to: Senior Engineering Manager Clearance: SC Eligible (must be eligible for UK Security Clearance) Contract Type: Permanent, Full-time Reference: WS-ENG-SQA-001 About Whitespace Whitespace builds sovereign AI solutions for highly regulated and complex sectors. Our core product, Collective, is an AI operating system designed for secure, air-gapped, and sensitive environments. We are delivering at pace across high-profile government and commercial programmes and growing rapidly as a Series A-funded company. The Role We are looking for a Senior QA Engineer to own and raise quality across a major new programme. The remit is broad: it spans data-intensive systems, where quality means validating pipelines and the data flowing through them, and quantitative systems, where it means checking that outputs stand up against known reference cases. It also carries a formal dimension, in assembling the acceptance evidence that gets contractual milestones signed off. What matters most is the instinct to own quality rather than execute someone else's test plan, and the rigour to make the evidence trail hold up under scrutiny. You will work in a delivery-driven, highly autonomous engineering team, embedding quality from the first line of code to secure deployment. What You Will Do Design, build and maintain automated test suites across integration, end-to-end, regression and performance testing.Own and define test strategy, plans and coverage across the product, rather than executing a strategy set elsewhere.Build and maintain CI-integrated test automation frameworks.Perform functional, exploratory and non-functional testing (including performance and accessibility where relevant), and validate quantitative model outputs against reference cases.Establish quality gates, defect triage and clear reporting, and assemble the formal acceptance evidence required for customer milestone sign-off.Validate deployments into secure and air-gapped environments, and validate data pipelines, transformations and data quality end to end.Champion a quality culture and shift-left testing across engineering. Essential Requirements Strong experience in QA or test engineering for software products.Test automation with modern frameworks (e.g. Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, pytest).Strong scripting and programming skills (Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript).Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.Solid grasp of test strategy, API testing and defect management, with the ability to produce the documentation and evidence that formal acceptance depends on.SC Clearance held or willingness to undergo. Strong to Have Performance and load testing (e.g. k6, JMeter, Locust).Experience testing data-intensive, streaming or model-driven systems, including validating numerical or analytical outputs rather than only functional behaviour.Security-aware testing practices, and experience in regulated, audited or otherwise high-assurance delivery.Experience with containerised test environments. Desirable Experience in defence, government or regulated environments.Experience testing in air-gapped or restricted environments.ISTQB or equivalent certification. What We Offer We believe in working hard and playing hard. When we are on, we are fully on, delivering for customers who depend on us. But we also believe that sustainable high performance requires genuine rest and recovery. That is why we have built one of the most generous working patterns in the industry: Four-day working weeks in July, August and December. Every Friday off, all month.Last Friday of every month off. January through June and September through November, the last Friday is a company day off.Early finish every remaining Friday at 3pm. On Fridays where you are working, you finish at 3pm. In total, this adds up to approximately 22 additional full days off per year, plus the equivalent of a further 8 days in early finishes. That is roughly 30 days of additional time back on top of your standard annual leave. We trust our people to deliver and in return, we give them the space to recharge properly. Competitive salary and benefits package including company pension.Opportunity for equity options in a rapidly growing scale-up.Access to cutting-edge AI tools and technologies as core working instruments, not side projects.A genuine opportunity to shape how a high-growth company operates from the inside.The chance to work on technology trusted by the UK's most critical customers.A culture that values delivery over process, impact over optics and people over politics.