We are looking for a Founding Lead SDET to join an impressive, fast-growing tech business with a mature, high-calibre engineering function.
Rather than walking into chaos, you’ll be joining a team that already values great engineering - they need you to step in, take ownership of Quality, and define what elite testing looks like as they scale. You’ll set the strategy, embed modern quality-first practices, and build a team around you.
No corporate ego, no rigid blueprints - just a focus on actual engineering quality, collaboration, and creativity.
🚩 Fully-remote role (UK)
What You'll Actually Be Doing
- Setting the Strategy: Defining and executing an end-to-end Quality Strategy across the engineering organization, driving a true Shift-Left mindset and embedding practices like 3 Amigos to bake quality into the architecture early.
- Building the Function: Leading by example as the founding quality lead, with a clear roadmap to hire, mentor, and grow a dedicated QA/SDET team around you.
- Core Automation & Architecture: Designing and maintaining robust, scalable automated test frameworks in Go across API (gRPC/REST), integration, performance, and reliability testing.
- Architectural Influence: Sitting in on design discussions with backend, ML, and frontend teams to ensure testability, scalability, and observability are prioritized before a line of feature code is written.
What You Need to Bring
- Golang: a degree of Go knowledge, even if not extensive experience
- Quality Leadership: Deep knowledge of modern quality engineering methodologies (Shift-Left, 3 Amigos, BDD/TDD, risk-based testing) and a proven track record of embedding them within mature engineering teams.
- APIs & Distributed Systems: Hands-on experience testing secure, high-throughput APIs (both gRPC and REST).
- Team-Building Mindset: The ability and desire to establish best practices now and scale a team of high-performing engineers in the near future.
- Nice to Have: Kubernetes, modern CI/CD/DevOps practices, or exposure to AI/GPU workloads (e.g., vLLM, KServe).
If you’re looking to shape the entire quality capability for a high-scaling tech business, work with top-tier engineers, and build out your own team, let’s have a chat.