Senior QA Engineer (React / Headless CMS / Storybook) - Contractor

About us

Appnovation is a global, full-service digital partner that combines Strategy, Experience & Design, Engineering and Managed Services. We build digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as foundations for future growth.  Bold ambition. Practical action. Endless possibilities.

About the Role 

Appnovation is seeking an experienced and detail-oriented Senior QA Engineer with strong technical testing skills and hands-on experience validating modern React applications and headless CMS implementations, preferably Builder.IO, although Contentful or Sanity experience would also be relevant. This is an opportunity to ensure quality across a global project within our agile, cross-functional teams. The intention is for the role to be a mixture of hands-on manual and automated testing.

You will work with your immediate project team with developers, designers, and other QA engineers to understand requirements, validate that features look as designed and work as expected. Your day-to-day will include executing functional / user interface / cross browser / accessibility / CMS test scenarios, using automation tests to assist with test activities where appropriate. You will also be expected to prioritise & log defects and report test status during daily stand ups.

THE ESSENTIALS

A strong mix of the following skills will make you an excellent candidate:

• 5+ years of relevant experience in software quality assurance, focused on web applications.
• Experience testing headless CMS implementations (Builder.io, Contentful, Sanity or similar).
• Multi-lingual testing experience including English and non-English languages.
• Strong proficiency with browser DevTools — you understand & can confidently inspect and analyse HTML structure, CSS styling, JavaScript console errors, network requests, and performance metrics.
• Experience testing modern React applications, including understanding of component-based architecture, state management, and client-side rendering behaviour.
• Experience with component library testing, preferably Storybook.
• Hands-on experience with end-to-end & integration TS/JS test automation frameworks, preferably Playwright, although Cypress experience can also be considered. You should be able to independently write, maintain & extend automated test suites with minimal supervision, with a focus on “shift-left” automation, starting with component library tests first.
• Experience with and understanding of Git for branching and version control, including integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines as appropriate.
• Automated visual regression testing experience using tools like Percy (preferable), Chromatic, or BackstopJS.
• Experience using AI and LLMs to expedite the creation of test scenarios, both manual and automated.
• Solid understanding of accessibility testing practices (WCAG 2.2) and experience using tools like Axe, WAVE, or Lighthouse to automatically identify compliance issues.
• Experience validating responsive designs across devices and breakpoints, including testing on real devices on iOS and Android platforms.
• Experience with page performance testing, using tools such as Google Lighthouse to validate against Core Web Vitals metrics.
• Experience working in Agile environments with short sprint cycles, participating in refinement, and providing accurate test effort estimates.
• Strong communicator, proactive, able to prioritise workloads and make recommendations.

NICE TO HAVE

Experience in the following areas is a plus:

• Understanding of GraphQL endpoints which are prevalent in headless CMS providers.
• Experience with data migration validation testing.
• Knowledge of SEO validation techniques (structured data, meta tags, canonical URLs).
• Understanding of personalisation and A/B testing validation.
• Knowledge and experience of industry standard security practices such as OWASP