Senior Software Engineer – Quality Engineering & Testing

About Us

Sophos is a cybersecurity leader defending 600,000 organizations globally with an AI-driven platform and expert-led services. Sophos meets organizations wherever they are in their security maturity and grows with them to defeat cyberattacks. Its solutions combine machine learning, automation, and real-time threat intelligence with frontline human expertise from Sophos X-Ops to deliver advanced, 24/7 threat monitoring, detection, and response.

Sophos offers industry-leading managed detection and response (MDR) alongside a comprehensive portfolio of cybersecurity technologies — including endpoint, network, email, and cloud security, extended detection and response (XDR), identity threat detection and response (ITDR), and next-gen SIEM. Together with expert advisory services, these capabilities help organizations proactively reduce risk and respond faster, with the visibility and scalability needed to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Sophos goes to market with a global partner ecosystem, including Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), resellers and distributors, marketplace integrations, and cyber risk partners, giving organizations the flexibility to choose trusted relationships when securing their business. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More information is available at www.sophos.com .

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who cares deeply about building high-quality products - not just testing them after the fact. In this role, you’ll help shape how quality is engineered into our products from day one, working across software development, automation, and modern testing practices.

This role includes a blend of hands-on testing and automation. You’ll design systems, build tooling, and dive into manual testing where it adds the most value - all while helping the team deliver reliable software at scale.

We’re exploring how AI can meaningfully improve quality engineering beyond code assistants, and you’ll have the opportunity to shape that journey in a practical, grounded way. This is an area we’re actively evolving, not a fully mature capability today.

If you enjoy solving real engineering problems, improving how teams build software, and taking a pragmatic approach to quality, this role will give you the space to do it.

What You Will Do

Engineering Quality into the Product

• Partner with engineers, product managers, and designers to build quality into features from the start - not bolt it on at the end.
• Contribute directly to product code where it improves reliability, testability, and observability.
• Help shape system design decisions to reduce defects before they happen.

Building Scalable Test & Automation Systems

• Design and implement robust, maintainable automation across API, integration, and UI layers.
• Evolve our testing approach using modern engineering practices - focusing on fast feedback, meaningful and reliable results, and developer productivity.
• Improve CI/CD pipelines so quality checks are fast, reliable, and genuinely useful (not just gates).

Exploring AI-Driven Engineering

• Experiment with AI to improve how we test and validate software - from intelligent test generation, smarter failure analysis and self-healing approaches.
• Build or integrate tools that reduce manual effort and increase confidence in releases.

Raising the Bar for Engineering

• Help establish a strong, pragmatic quality culture that developers actually value.
• Ensure quality is a shared responsibility across the team, not owned by a single individual.
• Share ideas, mentor others, and contribute to how we continuously improve as a team.
• Influence engineering practices beyond your immediate team.

What You Bring

• Strong software engineering experience (JavaScript, TypeScript, or similar).
• A track record of building or improving automated testing in real-world systems.
• Experience working in modern development environments with CI/CD and cloud platforms.
• A practical mindset: you care about outcomes, not just frameworks or theory.
• Hands-on experience applying AI within quality engineering or testing contexts - for example, test generation, failure analysis, test optimisation, or similar.
• Ability to go beyond basic coding assistants and use AI to solve real testing or quality problems in innovative ways.

Nice to Have

• Experience working on security or high-reliability systems.
• Exposure to performance or security testing.
• Contributions to engineering communities, blogs, or open source.

What Success Looks Like

• Engineers move faster with more confidence because quality is built into their workflow.
• Testing provides fast, meaningful feedback - not noise.
• AI-driven approaches reduce manual effort and uncover issues earlier.
• The team sees quality as an enabler, not a bottleneck.

Why This Role Is Different

• You’ll be treated as a software engineer first, not a gatekeeper.
• You’ll