QA Engineer (Contract)

Job Title: QA Engineer

Company: Narwhal Labs (Narwhal Group Limited)

Location: Bristol, UK

Employment Type: Contract

Reports to: QA Lead

Rate: £400 per day

About Us

Narwhal Labs is the company behind DeepBlue OS — an autonomous revenue infrastructure platform that enables any business to answer every call, follow up every lead, and log every interaction across Voice, SMS, Email and WhatsApp. As an NVIDIA Inception Program Member and Google Partner, we are a 38\-person team with our platform launching in May 2026\. We build the infrastructure layer for serious businesses that want enterprise\-grade revenue operations at a fraction of traditional cost.

Role Overview

You'll be joining our QA engineering function alongside our existing QA lead. The testing architecture, CI/CD quality gates, and core automation frameworks are established — your job is to extend coverage, deepen the AI evaluation pipeline, and make sure the platform's reliability scales with the team and the customer base. This is an engineering role. You'll write code, debug systems, and ship infrastructure that the rest of the team depends on.

Key Responsibilities

*Extend and harden the automated test suite*

• Expand coverage across the backend (Python/FastAPI), frontend (TypeScript/Next.js), and admin portal — the test architecture and conventions are established; your job is to push them into the areas that aren't yet covered


• Write the tests that catch the bugs that code reviews miss — contract tests for cross\-service API boundaries, integration tests for the event pipeline, and regression tests for the edge cases that surface in production


• Own test reliability — when a test flakes, diagnose whether the test is wrong or the system is unstable, and fix the right one

• Extend the existing Cypress suite (frontend) and Playwright suite (admin) with coverage for critical user journeys — onboarding, billing, workflow creation, inbox, and contact management


• Drive the migration of frontend E2E tests from Cypress to Playwright where it improves stability, debuggability, or CI performance — the admin portal is already on Playwright; the frontend is still on Cypress


• Build E2E scenarios that exercise cross\-service flows end\-to\-end: tenant signs up → provisions → creates workflow → agent handles call → conversation appears in inbox → billing records usage

• Extend the continuous evaluation pipeline for the classification and goal evaluation system — the platform uses Langsmith for tracing and a dedicated classifier service; your job is to widen the coverage of what gets evaluated and how regressions are caught


• Build reproducible test cases for non\-deterministic AI behaviour — seeded LLM responses, recorded conversation fixtures, and deterministic replay of agent workflows


• Work with the voice and AI engineers to define what "correct" means for new classifiers, then encode that definition as automated assertions

• Extend billing integrity tests across the payment service (Stripe integration with test clocks is already in place) as new pricing models, currencies, and credit top\-up flows are introduced


• Design and maintain tenant isolation tests — automated checks that prove data, API responses, and event routing never leak across tenant boundaries


• Validate that usage metering (LLM tokens, voice minutes, SMS) matches billing calculations end\-to\-end

• Maintain and extend the quality gates in GitHub Actions — test suites, lint checks, security scans, and migration validation must all pass before code reaches staging


• Surface test health as a shared engineering metric — flake rates, coverage trends, and time\-to\-feedback should be visible, not guessed at


• Contribute to post\-incident analysis when staging or production issues occur — identify which test should have caught it, and add it

You're a detail\-oriented QA engineer whose instinct is to break things methodically before anyone else does. You're grounded in manual and exploratory testing — you can pick up a feature, understand what it's supposed to do, and systematically find the gaps between intent and implementation without waiting for a test script to tell you where to look.

• You have 2\+ years in QA or test engineering roles where manual testing was a core part of your work — not something you did reluctantly while waiting for automation to catch up.


• You can write clear, reproducible bug reports that engineers actually want to fix — with steps, expected vs. actual, environment details, and severity, not just "it doesn't work".


• You understand how web applications fit together well enough to test them intelligently — you know what a 500 is, you can read a network tab, you can tell the difference between a frontend rendering bug and a backend data issue.


• You've worked with or alongside automation frameworks (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or similar) — you don't need to be the person who architects the suite, but you need to understand how your manual findings translate into automated regression tests.


• You can test APIs directly — you're comfortable with Postman, curl, or similar tools and can validate a backend endpoint independently of the UI.


• You've tested systems where data accuracy matters — billing, financial calculations, user permissions, or multi\-tenant environments where "close enough" isn't acceptable.


• You're organised enough to manage test coverage across multiple features in parallel without things falling through the cracks — whether that's spreadsheets, test management tools, or a system that works for you.

• You've worked in a team where your manual testing directly informed what got automated — you understand the handoff between "I found this" and "now it's a permanent regression check".


• You've tested AI, conversational, or non\-deterministic systems where the expected output isn't always identical — and you developed a practical approach to deciding what's a bug versus what's acceptable variation.


• You've worked on contract before and can hit the ground running without a month of onboarding.

We're building something global at Narwhal, and we mean that in every sense. The work we do requires different ways of thinking — and different ways of thinking come from different people.

At Narwhal, we're committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences, and we actively work to ensure our hiring process is fair and accessible for everyone. Reasonable adjustments are available at every stage, just reach out and we'll make it happen.

Pay: £350\.00\-£400\.00 per day

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Bristol BS1

This listing is from indeed. View original listing ↗