About Testing jobs
QA and software testing in the UK has shifted substantially in the last five years. The 55 roles currently listed on Geekery.io break into four main clusters: manual / functional testing (testers running through test cases, exploratory testing, and acceptance criteria), test automation (engineers building automated test suites in Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, or similar), SDET (software development engineer in test) — engineering-heavy roles that build test infrastructure, frameworks, and tools — and performance and load testing (engineers running JMeter, Gatling, k6, and similar tools to validate systems under load).
The biggest shift in UK QA hiring is the move from manual-only roles toward automation-heavy roles. Pure manual testing is in declining demand; employers increasingly expect testers to be able to write at least some automation. SDET roles in particular have grown rapidly and now command engineering-level salaries.
UK QA salaries: junior manual tester no data, mid-level automation £26,000–£75,000, senior automation / SDET £55,000–£65,000, and lead QA / expert SDET £45,000–£62,205. The UK median is around £45,000, but the SDET-heavy median is closer to £55,000–£60,000.
UK QA hiring is fairly evenly distributed across London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, and Leeds, with strong demand in banking, insurance, e-commerce, gaming, and SaaS. Roughly 45% of QA roles offer full remote working within the UK, especially in automation and SDET roles.
The most common tools and frameworks in UK QA ads: Selenium + Java/Python (legacy enterprise), Cypress + JavaScript/TypeScript (modern web), Playwright + TypeScript (fastest-growing), JMeter / Gatling / k6 for performance, Postman / REST Assured for API testing, and Cucumber / SpecFlow for BDD. AI-assisted testing tools (testRigor, Mabl, Functionize) are appearing in ads but are still a minority of total demand.
If you’re moving into QA from another engineering discipline, the easiest path is test automation — your existing programming skills translate directly. Manual testing is harder to enter as a career switcher because employers usually expect prior testing experience.
