Principal QA Engineer

Drive the quality engineering strategy across the platform. You’ll define Cloudsmith’s approach to quality - how we test, what we measure, and what confidence we need before we ship. That strategy needs to work for a platform operating at the scale and reliability expectations of critical infrastructure.

Build quality capability in engineering teams. You’ll pair with engineers, run workshops, facilitate risk and coverage conversations, and create the conditions for teams to develop their own quality instincts. The aim is engineers who think about testability from the design/discovery stages and make confident, well-reasoned testing decisions - with decreasing reliance on you to do it for them.

Define the measures that matter. You’ll design the quality metrics that tell us whether we’re improving and help us make better decisions about reliability, quality, and performance.

Shape how we build and ship safely. You’ll work with engineering and platform teams on the quality implications of how we deploy - including the intersection of our feature flagging strategy, canary deployment ambitions, and the blast radius reduction we need when things go wrong.

Raise the quality culture across the engineering organization. You’ll contribute through documentation, internal talks, working group facilitation, and by being the person others turn to when they’re making hard tradeoffs about coverage, risk, and testability.

Significant hands-on experience in quality engineering roles, with a track record that includes defining and delivering testing strategy at an organizational level. We’d typically expect 8+ years in QA or quality engineering, with the last few at senior or lead level.

Proven experience testing at scale on distributed cloud infrastructure - you’ve worked on platforms with high throughput, complex data flows, or large user bases, with strong working knowledge of AWS. You understand how distributed systems fail, how to design tests that surface those failure modes, and how testing strategy has to evolve to meet those demands.

Deep expertise in test automation, including E2E frameworks (Playwright, Cypress, or similar), API testing, and CI/CD integrations - ideally within B2B SaaS platforms with complex backend systems or developer-facing products. You should be comfortable getting into the details of a test suite and understanding immediately what’s missing and why.

Strong understanding of software delivery and deployment patterns, including how quality considerations intersect with feature flags, staged rollouts, and release management in a cloud-native environment.

The ability to identify risk in a system and reason about it clearly - understanding what gaps in coverage are telling you about design and process, and using that to drive structural improvement.

A genuine belief that quality is a team capability to be built. You’re energized by making engineers better at quality thinking, and you measure your own success by how confidently teams operate independently.

Strong facilitation and communication skills. You’ll be working with engineers, engineering leadership, and occasionally the broader business. Written clarity and the ability to make a technical case compellingly are both important.

At Cloudsmith, our values shape how we make decisions every day. Here's what we mean by that in the context of this role:

Automate everything. We believe that if it can be automated, it should be. You'll apply this to your own work - releases, testing pipelines, validation - and help raise the bar for the whole team.

Collective ownership. You'll take responsibility for what you build long-term, respond when things break, and treat the entire platform as something you have a stake in - not just your corner of it.

Transparency. We share what's working and what isn't, openly. You'll be honest about tradeoffs, flag problems early, and communicate progress in a way that keeps stakeholders - internal and external - genuinely informed.

Bias for action. We believe in pragmatism first, perfection later. You'll know when to move quickly with a good solution rather than waiting for an ideal one, and you'll build the kind of instincts that make that call reliably.

Just better. We believe everything can and should be improved upon. You'll bring a continuous improvement mindset to your work - questioning defaults, proposing refinements, and raising the bar without being precious about it.

Customer collaboration. We stay close to the people who use what we build. You'll treat customer feedback as a genuine input to your work, and care deeply about the experience of the engineers on the other side of your tools.

This role offers the chance to shape and evolve quality engineering standards at a company whose platform thousands of engineering teams depend on to control and secure their software supply chain. You’ll be coming in at a moment when quality is a stated engineering priority, with leadership investment and organizational will to do this properly.

From startups to Fortune 500 companies, your work will directly impact how organizations control and secure their software supply chain. When Cloudsmith ships reliably, confidently, and safely - that’s what you’ll have shaped.

This role is designed as a senior individual contributor position, with a scope that spans the whole engineering organization. Over time, it could evolve in a few directions.

For someone drawn to technical depth, there’s a natural path toward principal architecture - owning the quality and testability of increasingly complex platform systems, and influencing how the platform is built as much as how it’s tested.

For someone interested in people leadership, the quality engineering function could grow into a formal practice or discipline - with direct reports and a defined quality engineering career path beneath it, as the organization scales.

Note: You must be based in Ireland or the United Kingdom and have the right to work independently without requiring sponsorship.

A position based in Ireland or the United Kingdom.

A competitive compensation package, including equity.

With comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.

Plus, generous annual leave and flexible working policies to suit your lifestyle.

Including a professional development budget for conferences and training.

In a dynamic, innovative, trust-centric, and supportive work environment.

With the opportunity to shape a fast-growing Series B startup (and beyond).

Regular (monthly-ish) travel may be required for team meetings.

Regular (quarterly-ish) travel may also be required for events and customers.

Regardless of your location, we deeply care about the health and wellness of our staff and their families; a sustainable pace is important to us. In addition to generous annual leave (PTO), we offer health and wellbeing benefits along with flexible family-friendly working policies.

You will have an enormous opportunity to learn new skills alongside your colleagues, and your continued professional development is essential to us because it's important to you. We will support you with budgets for equipment, training, books, conferences, travel, and certifications. The more powerful you become, the better for all of us.

Cloudsmith is headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland, with fully-equipped office space that’s open 24x7. We use our H.Q. regularly for activities like working sessions, team planning, meets and greets, and sometimes other group activities (like games!). We also hold all-hands offsites in Belfast thrice yearly, with guest speakers and team activities. Many Cloudsmithers work remotely, so we rely on our online collaboration tools; Slack, Google Docs, Linear, and other popular collaboration tools are how we work.

Cloudsmith is an equal-opportunity employer proud to nurture a diverse workplace that welcomes applications from individuals of all races, genders, and ethnic groups. We do not discriminate on age, religion, sexual orientation, citizenship status, military service, or health conditions. We will not tolerate discrimination of any kind within our workforce.