QA Engineer

Location: Hybrid / Remote (UK-based) Team: Engineering Reports to: VP of Engineering

About SourceWhale

Financial Times’ fastest-growing software company in Europe (2025), SourceWhale is a group of really smart people solving productivity problems for people-intensive industries using AI and automation.

Founded in 2020, we are currently focused on automating the manual, tedious parts of sales and recruitment activities, empowering companies and their employees to get more done. The platform consolidates every stage of the industry's work-flows into one sleek, integrated tool. Building alongside cutting-edge LLMs, SourceWhale is poised to be the company that puts the AI 'agent' in recruitment agencies.

Voted one of The Sunday Times’ Best Places to Work (2025), we pursue innovation, champion employee wellbeing and offer fast-paced growth in a supportive transatlantic culture. Our engineering team is a group of thoughtful, collaborative professionals who value quality, continuous improvement, and meaningful product outcomes over outputs. As we enter our next stage of growth, we’re on the lookout for a QA Engineer who wants to make an impact on a platform used all day, every working day, by thousands of people.

The Role

As a QA Engineer at SourceWhale, you won’t just "receive specs"—you’ll help shape them. You will work within a small, highly experienced team, collaborating closely with Product Managers and Software Engineers to ensure our users experience a reliable, intuitive, and high-performing product.

This role focuses primarily on manual, exploratory, and context-driven testing. You will take a user-focused mindset, challenging assumptions, assessing risk, and ensuring quality is baked into the process from feature design to release.

What You’ll Do

• Own Product Quality: Take end-to-end responsibility for quality, from the initial design phase through to production release.

• Strategic Manual Testing: Design, plan, and execute thorough exploratory tests across our web application, going beyond predefined cases to find critical edge cases.

• Collaborative Design: Actively participate in product discussions, challenging design and implementation decisions to uphold high standards.

• Risk Communication: Identify and communicate technical and UX risks clearly and constructively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Data-Informed Testing: Use logs, production issues, and usage patterns to guide your testing efforts and identify where the biggest risks lie.

• Voice of the User: Ensure every release supports a seamless customer experience by spotting usability issues and providing actionable UI/UX feedback.

• Process Evolution: Help define and refine QA processes and documentation as our engineering team continues to scale.

Core Traits We’re Looking For

• Startup Mindset: You thrive in fast-paced environments where priorities move quickly. You are comfortable taking ownership and making decisions without rigid processes.

• Self-Starter: You are confident picking up tickets, exploring features independently, and proactively engaging with developers to clarify behavior.

• Exploratory & Context-Driven: You possess strong critical thinking skills. You naturally explore systems and can quickly pivot your testing focus based on the product’s immediate priorities.

• UI/UX Intuition: You have a keen eye for user interface flows and a passion for advocating for a high-quality user experience.

• Thoughtful Use of AI: You demonstrate practical use of AI tools in your workflow. You understand where AI adds value and where its limitations lie.

• Strong Communicator: You can navigate high-trust environments, offering feedback respectfully while remaining firm on quality standards.

Experience & "Nice-to-Haves"

• Required: Solid experience in manual testing of complex web applications.

• Bonus: Experience in the Recruitment Tech industry or working with CRM integrations.

• Bonus: Data fluency (validating data integrity or working with data-heavy systems).

• Bonus: Exposure to test automation.

Our Engineering Principles

These principles guide how we work and grow together:

• Teamwork: We collaborate openly, communicate honestly, and celebrate shared success.

• Product quality: We take pride in delivering robust, high-impact solutions for our users.

• Peer leadership: We foster continuous learning, feedback, and accountability.

Our teams focus on sustained product outcomes, not one-off projects. We deliver continuous value, evolve based on feedback, minimise dependencies, and operate with transparency and collective responsibility.

Benefits

• 25 days annual leave (plus public holidays)

• MacBook + any additional tech or software you need

• Flexible working arrangements

• Private Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance through Aviva

• Income Protection Insurance

• Extended mental health cover and Employee Assistance Programme

• Compassionate leave policy

• Private pension contributions (Royal London)

• Monthly company social events

• Regular in-person hackathons