Quality Assurance Automation Engineer

Automation QA Engineer (AI-Enabled) (Contract)

Rate: £450 to £500 per day | IR35: Outside | Location: Remote (UK) | Start: ASAP (within 1 to 2 weeks) | Duration: Initial contract to end of December 2026, with likely extension through 2027

About the opportunity

Buildcircle is partnering with a well-established energy business, part of a major UK energy group, to find experienced Automation QA Engineers for an upcoming project.

Our client helps organisations decarbonise and cut costs through large-scale onsite energy solutions. These include combined heat and power, solar PV and heat pumps, all backed by long-term operations and maintenance services. They also offer in-house financing and net zero consultancy, helping customers plan realistic routes to cleaner, more secure and more affordable energy.

The project

The client is unifying parts of its current technical landscape, bringing a range of existing applications and platforms together into a more joined-up, efficient estate. You’ll make sure that work is delivered with quality built in: designing and building automated test coverage across new and existing systems, and giving the team confidence to release often and safely.

This is an AI-forward role. We’re looking for QA engineers who already use AI tools as a core part of how they work day to day, whether that’s generating test cases, writing and refactoring test code, analysing failures or creating test data, and who can bring that approach to the team from day one.

The contract runs initially until the end of this year, and there’s a strong chance it will be extended to the end of 2027.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing and building automated test suites across UI, API and integration layers
• Creating or evolving test frameworks, ideally from scratch, that are maintainable and scale with the platform
• Integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines so quality checks run on every change
• Carrying out manual and exploratory testing where it adds value, particularly on complex or new functionality
• Using AI tools to speed up test design, scripting, data creation and defect analysis
• Working closely with developers, product and business stakeholders to define acceptance criteria and test strategy
• Investigating and clearly reporting defects, risks and quality trends

What we’re looking for

• Solid experience as an Automation QA or Test Engineer in Agile delivery teams
• Essential: proven, hands-on use of AI in your current workflows, and the ability to give real examples of how it has improved your testing output
• Strong coding skills in at least one language commonly used for automation (for example Java, Python, TypeScript or C#)
• Experience with modern automation tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar, plus API testing tools
• Ability to write test frameworks from scratch is highly desirable
• Comfortable with manual and exploratory testing alongside automation
• A quality mindset: thinking about risk, edge cases and the end user, not just ticking off test cases
• Experience testing integrations, data flows or multi-system environments is a strong plus
• Energy, utilities or infrastructure experience is a plus but not essential

Why apply?

• Outside IR35 contract at £450 to £500 per day
• Fully remote
• Initial contract to the end of 2026, with probable extension through to the end of 2027
• A chance to put AI-driven ways of working to use on a large-scale platform project
• A meaningful project supporting organisations on their journey to net zero
• Early start, available within the next one to two weeks

Interested? Apply now or get in touch with the Buildcircle team to find out more. Please include a short note on how you currently use AI in your work.