Principal QA Engineer

Salary: £41,000 - 41,000 per year

Requirements

• Significant hands-on experience in quality engineering roles, with a track record of defining and delivering testing strategy at an organizational level; typically 8+ years in QA or quality engineering, with the last few at senior or lead level.
• Proven experience testing at scale on distributed cloud infrastructure, with strong working knowledge of AWS.
• Deep expertise in test automation, including E2E frameworks such as Playwright or Cypress, API testing, and CI/CD integrations.
• Experience within B2B SaaS platforms with complex backend systems or developer-facing products.
• Strong understanding of software delivery and deployment patterns, including feature flags, staged rollouts, and release management in a cloud-native environment.
• Ability to identify risk in a system, reason clearly about coverage gaps, and drive structural improvement.
• Genuine belief that quality is a team capability to be built.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills, including written clarity and the ability to make a technical case compellingly.
• Must be based in Ireland or the United Kingdom and have the right to work independently without requiring sponsorship.

Responsibilities

• Drive our quality engineering strategy across the platform, defining how we test, what we measure, and what confidence we need before we ship.
• Build quality capability in engineering teams by pairing with engineers, running workshops, facilitating risk and coverage conversations, and helping teams develop their own quality instincts.
• Define the quality measures and metrics that help us track improvement and make better decisions about reliability, quality, and performance.
• Shape how we build and ship safely, including the quality implications of our deployment strategy, feature flagging, canary deployments, and blast-radius reduction.
• Raise our quality culture across the engineering organization through documentation, internal talks, working groups, and guidance on coverage, risk, and testability.
• Work closely with engineering leadership, principal engineers, and delivery squads to embed quality thinking throughout the product development lifecycle.
• Help engineers take ownership of quality in their own work and improve testability from design and discovery through delivery.

Technologies

• AI
• API
• AWS
• Backend
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Cypress
• E2E
• Support
• Playwright
• Slack
• Security

More

Cloudsmith is building the operating system for the modern software supply chain, running a global, fully managed, multi-tenant SaaS platform that helps organizations secure, govern, and distribute software artifacts at scale. We support customers from startups to the Fortune 500 across 30+ formats and ecosystems, and we recently raised our Series C to accelerate Cloudsmith 2.0, including deeper artifact intelligence, stronger policy and provenance, faster package-aware delivery, and infrastructure built for engineering teams and the modern AI-driven software factory. This is a senior individual contributor role with scope across the engineering organization, offering the chance to shape quality engineering standards at a company where quality is a stated priority. We offer a competitive compensation package including equity, comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance, generous annual leave, flexible working policies, a professional development budget, and a dynamic, trust-centric, supportive environment. The role is based in Ireland or the United Kingdom, with regular travel required for team meetings, events, and customers. We are headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and many of us work remotely using collaboration tools such as Slack, Google Docs, and Linear.

last updated 36 week of 2026