SDET/QA, Mobile Automation

About This Role

We're looking for an SDET/QA who's hands-on with test automation and ready to grow. Your home base will be mobile, writing and maintaining automated tests that keep our iOS and Android apps shipping with confidence and you'll bring your automation skills across our other consumer-facing surfaces as needs arise.
 
This is a hands-on IC role. You'll write automation code daily, contribute to testing strategy within your team, and help raise the quality bar across the squads you work with. You’ll report to the QA manager, sit within the Mobile Application Development team and partner closely with engineers across mobile, web, and platform.
You'll focus on three areas:
• Mobile Test Automation: writing and maintaining Appium-based automated test suites for iOS and Android across UI, integration, and API layers.
• Cross-Platform Quality: applying automation practices to web and other application surfaces when the team needs it.
• Tooling and Infrastructure: contributing to the automation framework, CI/CD test integration, and shared test utilities.
 

Who You Are and What You'll Do

Impact
You bring 2–4 years of QA or SDET experience with solid mobile automation depth—you've built and maintained test automation for consumer-facing apps, not just one-off scripts. Here, you'll write and execute automated and manual test plans for our iOS and Android apps and extend that work across our web surfaces as the team grows.
With hands-on experience in mobile testing frameworks (e.g., XCTest, Espresso, Appium, or similar), you'll run test execution across real devices and emulators, learning to scale across device configurations.
You have experience with automation frameworks (e.g., Cypress, Playwright, Selenium) and can apply them when extending test coverage to web surfaces.
You usually meet deadlines, flag risks when you're behind, and help the team get product features out on time.
You update outdated test processes and tools rather than working around them. When a manual workflow can be automated or a flaky step can be fixed, you fix it.
Quality
Your manual and automated test cases cover both positive and negative paths. You'll deliver test suites that your squad can rely on for confident releases.
Reproducing issues with clear repro steps is second nature—concise defect tickets with screenshots, logs, and automation scripts that make bugs easy to fix.
Your test code builds on existing patterns, best practices, and established tools. It fits cleanly into the team's infrastructure rather than introducing one-off approaches.
You keep documentation current: test plans posted in the test-case management system, automation setup guides, and contribution instructions that teammates actually use.
Your test plans hold up to team review. You incorporate feedback and iterate rather than treating review as a rubber stamp.
Strategy
You proactively suggest improvements to testing processes, tools, and coverage rather than waiting to be told.
You define manual test strategies based on best practices and contribute to the team's automated testing framework (e.g., page-object model, test-data management) so the squad can scale coverage.
You spot product quality issues through exploratory testing and propose improvements—accessibility gaps, cross-browser coverage, edge cases others miss.
You participate in generating the team's testing roadmap, contributing capacity estimates and proposing automation items for quarterly planning.
People
You receive and incorporate feedback well, and you give constructive feedback to peers, whether that's on automation approaches, testing priorities, or how the team works together.
You're becoming a go-to expert in an area - mobile automation, a specific tool, a testing domain - and teammates come to you for advice. You guide less experienced QAs on techniques like exploratory test charters.
You contribute actively in team discussions, sprint retros, and chat channels, sharing what you're learning and asking questions that sharpen the team's thinking.
You drive cross-team knowledge sharing on testing practices and help build a QA community of practice.

Nice to Have

Experience with performance or load testing for mobile or web.
Familiarity with accessibility testing tools and WCAG compliance.
Experience with visual regression testing or screenshot diffing.
Open source contributions or public technical writing.

What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months)

Months 1–3: Learn the mobile codebase, existing test coverage, and release process. Start writing automated tests for the highest-priority gaps.
Months 3–6: Ship meaningful additions to test coverage and framework reliability; integrate suites into the release pipeline and contribute to shared automation patterns.
Months 6–12: Own a solid chunk of mobile automation. Demonstrate measurable gains in defect detection or test cycle time, and begin contributing automation patterns beyond mobile.

Why This Role, Why Now

KCL is transitioning from a content-led company to a product-led one, and our mobile apps are at the center of that shift. As we ship faster and expand our product surface—1-Clip deals, store loyalty integrations, personalized alerts—the cost of bugs in production goes up.

We need an SDET who can build solid test automation for our mobile apps, integrated into every release pipeline and trusted by the engineers on the team. You'll join a growing quality practice and have a clear path to senior as you expand your impact across the org.

What We Value in This Role

Deliver Outcomes That Matter. You feel the customer's pain firsthand and use it to prioritize what actually moves the needle.
Own It Out Loud. Test quality is your product. You own the coverage gaps and release readiness in your area; when something breaks you step up before anyone has to ask.
Drive Momentum. You don't wait for a fully-formed spec to start moving—you'd rather define the problem and get traction than wait for permission.
Clear Is Kind. When a test plan has gaps or a release feels risky, you say so. You call out quality tensions early before they harden into production incidents, and share your reasoning openly because real growth starts with real talk.
Generous by Default. You anticipate what your teammates and partners need to succeed, and you choose what's best for the company over what's easiest for yourself.

Physical Requirements

Write code; articulate and respond to requests electronically (chat, email); discuss issues over video and/or audio and/or electronically. Travel to meet in person 2-4x a year.
Reaching: Extending hand(s) and arm(s) in any direction.
Use of Fingers: Picking, pinching, typing or otherwise working, primarily with fingers rather than with the whole hand or arm as in handling.
Talking: Expressing or exchanging ideas by means of the spoken word; those activities where detailed or important spoken instructions must be conveyed to other workers accurately, loudly, or quickly.
Hearing: Perceiving the nature of sounds at normal speaking levels with or without correction, and having the ability to receive detailed information through oral communication, and making fine discriminations in sound.
Repetitive motions: Making substantial movements (motions) of the wrists, hands, and/or fingers.
The worker is required to have close visual acuity to perform an activity such as: preparing and analyzing data and figures; transcribing; viewing a computer terminal; extensive reading.
The worker is required to have visual acuity to determine the accuracy, neatness, and thoroughness of the work assigned
None: The worker is not substantially exposed to adverse environmental conditions (as in typical office or administrative work)