QA Engineer

Cirata, plc.; Belfast; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 55,000; Full time

Job summary

A data analytics firm in Belfast is seeking a Technical QA Engineer who excels in exploratory testing and has strong Linux skills. The candidate will build and configure testing environments, create custom tools, and investigate complex issues. Ideal candidates will have a bachelor's degree and a proven background in technical QA. The role emphasizes strong problem-solving and communication skills within a dynamic data-driven environment.

Qualifications

• Comfortable and proficient on the Linux command line.
• Proven experience in technical QA with an exploratory testing focus.
• Able to clearly articulate complex technical issues.

Responsibilities

• Build and configure test environments using automation frameworks.
• Create custom tools and scripts to support exploratory testing.
• Develop test plans based on gathered requirements.
• Conduct risk-first exploratory testing and document findings.
• Investigate and report issues swiftly to the engineering team.

Skills

Linux command line proficiency

Exploratory testing

Problem-solving

Strong communication skills

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Your Role and Team

UAT, but done a little differently. Our UAT team is an experience-based exploratory testing team that partners with development from the first build to the final release. Your goal is to act as the first, most critical customer: a technical expert who creatively challenges our software to find high-impact issues before we release into our business-critical deployments.

This isn't a testing role where you run through a script or a set of instructions. You are a detective, an engineer, and a builder all in one. You'll be working in the world of distributed systems, data analytics platforms, and multi-cloud environments.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Building the infrastructure: You won't just use environments, you'll build and configure them to suit what you need at the time. You'll use automation frameworks for common setups and tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Docker to construct new environments from scratch. Distributed computing is constantly changing, this is how we stay up to date.
• Build the tooling: Exploratory testing is all about making a creative journey from A to B. To support that journey, you'll need to make custom tools and scripts to set the scene. This is an opportunity to keep development skills sharp, or to learn more about how to build the things you need.
• Investigating Requirements: You'll craft test plans based on strong contextual understanding of the problem being solved, gathering requirements from Jira tickets, product owners, customer feedback, and internal conversations to understand both the explicit and implicit needs.
• Creative Exploratory Testing: You'll go through iterative, risk-first exploratory testing sessions. Your goal is to find the most important, use-case breaking issues first. After that, you're looking for how we can elevate our products and their supporting documentation.
• Reporting Issues: You'll investigate issues to the point where it feels appropriate to hand over to engineering. You'll gather all the relevant information to fast‑track issues through the software development process.
• Documenting Your Testing: You'll keep clear, concise notes on your test explorations, findings, and environment setups to build our team's collective knowledge.

Core Requirements (The Must-Haves)

• Linux, Shell & DevOps Skills: You must be comfortable and proficient on the Linux command line. You must be confident using SSH and working across many remote machines. This is the single most important technical skill for this role, as it's the foundation for everything we do.
• A "Tester's" Mindset: Proven experience in a technical QA or Test Engineer role where you focused on exploratory testing, ambiguity, and a risk-based approach.
• A Natural Problem‑Solver: You have a "tinkerer's" mentality. When something breaks, your first instinct is to find out why.
• Strong Communicator: You can clearly articulate (verbally and in‑writing) complex technical issues and piece together information from multiple sources.

Bonus Points (The Nice-to-Haves)

• Distributed Systems: Hadoop (HDFS, Hive, Spark), Ceph, IBM Spectrum Scale
• Cloud Platforms: AWS (EC2, S3, Glue) or Azure (ADLS Gen2, VMs), Google Cloud (VMs, Dataproc)
• Data Platforms: Databricks (Unity Catalog), Snowflake, Watsonx.data
• Data Formats: Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake
• Authentication/Authorisation: Kerberos, TLS, OAuth, LDAP
• Infrastructure & Environment Experience: Hands‑on experience building or managing test environments. Familiarity with tools like Terraform, Ansible, or Docker is a massive advantage.
• Reading Code: Basic familiarity with Java, Go, Python & Bash to help with your investigations. This is something you can learn more about as you go, when you need a tool you'll learn some of this.

Who We’re Looking for

This is a technical role with a tester's mindset. The ideal candidate is a curious problem‑solver who loves to tinker and understand how things work.

Education

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Location

• Belfast

About Cirata

We are a new company with over 45 patents and 15+ years of data science expertise. We specialize in accelerating data‑driven revenue growth by automating data transfer and integration to modern cloud analytics and AI platforms without downtime or disruption. With Cirata, data leaders can leverage the power of AI and analytics across their entire enterprise data estate to freely choose analytics technologies, avoid vendor, platform, or cloud lock‑in while making AI and analytics faster, cheaper, and more flexible. Cirata’s portfolio of products and technology solutions make strategic adoption of modern data analytics efficient, automated, and risk‑free. Visit https://cirata.com/.