Senior Quality Engineer II

Policy Expert - Senior Quality Engineer II

Are you ready to transform the insurance industry?

Policy Expert is a forward-thinking business that loves to get things done. Leveraging proprietary technology and smart data, we offer reliable products and a wow customer experience.

Having achieved rapid growth since being founded in 2011, we've won over 1.5 million customers in Home, Motor and Pet insurance and have been ranked the UK's No.1-rated home insurer by Review Centre since 2013.

Hear from our team about what it's like working at Policy Expert
• About the Quality Engineering Chapter

While you'll be embedded in the Home Tribe, you will be a key member of our strong and supportive Quality Engineering chapter. We are a close-knit group of quality specialists, acting as a force multiplier for the entire engineering organisation. Our chapter is built on a culture of collaboration and mutual support; we regularly pair, run bi-weekly workshops, align quarterly on our strategic initiatives, and get together for quarterly socials to strengthen our community. One of our key ceremonies is the weekly Quality Roundtable-a space for healthy debate where we share learnings and encourage everyone to bring a curious mind and good questions. This collaborative environment ensures we help each other succeed, with the ultimate purpose of building confidence into the development lifecycle for everyone.

About The Role

This isn't just another testing role. This is a strategic senior position at the heart of Home, a cross-functional, product-led Tribe that represents one of our most important business areas. As a Senior Quality Engineer II, you will be the quality authority for the tribe, acting as a direct partner to the Head of Engineering to drive the successful delivery of our most critical strategic initiatives.

Your mission is to champion a holistic, risk-based approach to quality. You will be a catalyst for engineering excellence, not a gatekeeper, coaching your squads to weave quality into every stage of product development-from initial idea to production and beyond. You will drive the tribe's quality strategy, making informed, pragmatic decisions that balance engineering excellence with the delivery of tangible business and customer value.

A huge part of your impact will be through people. You will be a dedicated mentor to our Quality Engineers in the tribe, directly shaping the next generation of quality leaders at Policy Expert and helping us build a sustainable culture of experts.

Our Tech Stack

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies:

• Java , Kotlin , and Groovy to write our application and test code
• Dynamo / Postgres / MySQL / Aurora / S3 for most persistent data storage
• SNS/SQS for our event-driven architecture
• Fargate and Docker to schedule and run our services
• AWS for most of our infrastructure, including Canaries for synthetic monitoring
• React and TypeScript for our client-facing apps, with Cypress , Playwright , and Storybook for testing and development
• NodeJS for serverless / middleware applications
• GraphQL / REST for client APIs, with PACT for contract testing
• GitHub Actions for our CI/CD

Your day to day:

• Own the Quality Strategy for Home Tribe: Partner with Home's engineering and product leadership to define, own, and drive the tribe's overarching testing and quality strategy, ensuring it aligns with our Guiding Policy for Technology and business needs.
• Mentor and Develop Talent: Provide direct coaching and mentorship to our QEs in the tribe, helping them grow their skills in automation, system design, and strategic thinking in line with our Policy Expert Progression Framework.
• Drive Technical Excellence: Lead the quality workstream for key strategic initiatives, including the tribe's Disaster Recovery testing programme and Operational Excellence objectives.
• Evolve Our Systems: Proactively identify architectural needs and risks. You will lead discussions and create proposals (e.g., RFCs, ADRs) that champion improvements to our engineering standards across all key quality attributes, including observability, testability, security, and resilience.
• Lead Incident Response: Take ownership during incidents, fostering a culture of calm and clarity. You will lead, or partner with a Lead Engineer to run, the post-incident analysis process, ensuring that we learn from issues and drive meaningful improvements to prevent reoccurrence.
• Coordinate and Influence: Act as the key quality contact for a wide range of stakeholders, including (but not limited to) Product, Data, Risk, Compliance and Business stakeholders, ensuring quality is considered from inception to production.
• Champion Holistic Testing: Lead and facilitate a variety of testing activities, such as hands-on exploratory testing, risk storming, and threat modelling, to uncover unknown risks and ensure we are building the right thing, in the right way.
• Champion Data-Driven Quality: Help mature our engineering effectiveness metrics by implementing and tracking leading indicators that provide a forward-looking view of our engineering health.

Who are you:

• You are a seasoned Quality Engineer who thinks strategically about quality, risk, and business impact. You are comfortable owning the quality approach for a complex and critical domain.
• You are a natural mentor and coach. You find genuine satisfaction in developing the skills of others and have experience guiding engineers.
• You have a deep technical background founded on a strong knowledge of software engineering, including system design and architecture. You use this expertise-which goes beyond just test automation-to challenge and influence technical decisions for the long-term health of our systems.
• You are well versed in modern engineering practices, including ATDD, TDD, pair programming, CI/CD, robust test automation, and designing for key quality attributes like observability, resilience, and maintainability in complex, event-driven systems.
• You have hands-on experience implementing monitoring and observability tools and practices within an engineering team.
• You are a great communicator and collaborator, capable of coordinating efforts across multiple teams and influencing a wide range of stakeholders, from engineers to business leaders.
• You have a proven track record of evolving systems, proactively identifying risks, and driving improvements that have a measurable impact.

Interview Process

1. Introductory Call (30 mins): A chat with our Talent Partner to get to know each other and discuss your career aspirations and our vision for quality.
2. Technical Deep Dive (60 mins): A conversation with some of our engineering leaders to explore your technical literacy and experience in more depth.
3. Collaborative Technical Session (90 mins): A practical, hands-on pairing session with a couple of our engineers, focusing on how we'd solve problems together.
4. Domain & Values Conversation (60 mins): A final chat with Tribe Leadership to make sure we're a great long-term fit for each other.

Benefits:

This role will be based in our London office in a 50/50 Hybrid mode.

We match your pension contributions up to 7%

Private medical & Dental cover

Learning budget of £1,000 a year + Study leave (with encouragement to use it)

Enhanced maternity & paternity

Travel season ticket loan

Access to a wide selection of London O2 events and use of a Private Lounge

Employee Wellbeing Programme

Prayer room in Office

What We Stand for and Next Steps "We pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer. We treat all applications equally and recruit based solely on an individual's skills, knowledge, and experience. The quality and growing diversity of our team is a testament to this commitment"

At Policy Expert, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment for all candidates. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process to accommodate your needs, please do not hesitate to let us know. We are dedicated to ensuring every candidate has an equal opportunity to succeed and will work with you to provide the necessary support.

We aim to be in touch within 14 working days of your application - you will be notified if successful or unsuccessful. Please be encouraged to apply even if you do not meet all the requirements.

Useful links:

Glassdoor | Trust Pilot