ABOUT THE ROLE
A lot of teams have been told to "shift left" and have taken it to mean one thing: hand the entire testing pyramid to the developers and hope for the best. The result is familiar. Thin or non-existent QA support, unit tests written to satisfy a coverage gate rather than catch anything, brittle end-to-end suites nobody trusts, and CI pipelines that get slower and more expensive every quarter with nobody tending them.
Our clients keep asking us for the same thing: a senior quality mind who can come in, work alongside their engineers, and genuinely change how the team thinks about quality. Not someone to write all the tests for them, someone who makes the whole team better at owning them.
That is this role. You will embed with a client, often working across more than one of their development teams, and raise the quality bar from the inside: at the whiteboard before any code is written, in the test suites at every level of the pyramid, and in the pipelines that ship the work. You lead the quality discipline through influence, mentoring, and worked examples, not by taking the testing off anyone's plate.
Requirements
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Shift quality left, properly. Help teams catch defects at the cheapest possible moment: during refinement and task definition, before a line of code exists. Join story-writing and design discussions, ask the questions that surface ambiguity and edge cases early, and coach teams to build testability and clear acceptance criteria into the work from the start.
- Lift the whole testing pyramid. Work with developers across the full range, from unit and integration tests through to end-to-end and system testing. Help them write tests that are fast, deterministic, and worth trusting; rebalance suites that are top-heavy or flaky; and establish what to test at each level, and why.
- Make pipelines fast and cheap. Treat CI as a product. Profile and optimise pipeline definitions, cut wasted compute, parallelise and shard test execution sensibly, and shorten feedback loops so teams get a trustworthy signal in minutes, not hours. Help them see the time and cost their pipelines actually incur, and bring both down.
- Bring AI into the quality toolkit. Help teams get real value from AI-assisted development: generating and maintaining tests, accelerating code review, and shortening feedback loops, while keeping a critical eye on what these tools produce so quality and trust do not slip. You champion these tools and show teams how to use them well.
- Mentor and enable. This is the heart of the job. Pair with engineers, run workshops, review test code and pipeline changes, and leave behind teams that hold a higher quality bar on their own after you have gone. Success is measured by how much better the team is, not by how much you personally produced.
- Own quality strategy across the SDLC. Assess where a team or programme stands, agree a pragmatic plan to improve it, and drive that plan through delivery: test strategy, environments and test data, release confidence, and the metrics that tell everyone whether quality is moving in the right direction.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Deep, hands-on quality experience across the entire testing pyramid, from unit tests to end-to-end and system testing, with well-reasoned opinions about what belongs where.
- A real engineer's grasp of code. You read and write it comfortably, review pull requests on their merits, and earn the respect of senior developers because you speak their language.
- Genuine fluency in Agile delivery and what shift-left means in practice: influencing quality at definition and design time, not only at the test phase.
- Solid CI expertise. You can pick apart a pipeline, find the waste, and make it faster, cheaper, and more reliable. Tooling varies across our clients, so we care that you understand the principles; experience with the likes of GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or CircleCI is the kind of thing we mean.
- Comfort across the testing toolbox, whatever the stack. We work tool-agnostically and value transferable depth over any specific badge. To give a sense of the territory: Playwright, Cypress or Selenium for end-to-end; Jest, Vitest, JUnit or pytest at the unit and integration level; k6, JMeter or Gatling for performance.
- A pro-AI outlook, backed by hands-on experience. You use AI-assisted development tools in your own work, understand where they help and where they bite, and can coach a team to adopt them without lowering the quality bar.
- Outstanding mentoring and communication skills. You can teach, persuade, and shift a team's habits without holding formal authority over anyone, and you can do it with client stakeholders as readily as with engineers.
- The seniority to walk into an unfamiliar team, quickly read where their quality really stands, and earn trust fast.
NICE TO HAVE
- Experience in a consulting or client-facing setting, adapting to different teams, cultures, and codebases.
- Exposure to performance, security, accessibility, or contract testing.
- Familiarity with observability and what production telemetry tells you about quality.
- Contributions to the wider community: talks, writing, open source, or mentoring beyond your own team.
Benefits
What’s in it for You?
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Work with global teams and enterprise clients.
- Collaborative culture with room for growth.
- Opportunities to learn and work on modern supply chain technologies.
WHY MINDERA?
At Mindera, we use technology to build products we are proud of, with people we love.
We believe diverse teams build better products. Mindera is a place where you can be your authentic self, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, religion, or background. We strive to create an environment where everyone feels they belong and has an equal opportunity to grow.
Most of all, you get to work with a group of great people in a politics free environment where the whole team owns the project together. Our culture reflects our lean and self-management mindset, encouraging colleagues to take risks, make decisions, collaborate openly, and communicate with everyone.
Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand, and we value commitment, feedback, and empathy. We are proud of our work and love learning about everything as we navigate an Agile, Lean, and collaborative environment.
Curious to know more? Check out our Blog and our Handbook!
With offices located across Portugal, United Kingdom, United States, India, Romania, Brazil, Morocco, Spain, Australia, Vietnam join us as we expand and influence the future of software engineering worldwide.
