Job Description

Abel & Cole is an award-winning online food retailer with its head office based in South West London. Famous for our seasonal organic fruit & veg boxes, we deliver a wide range of excellent organic food to over 40,000 people's homes every week across London and the South, the Midlands and the Northwest. No air freighting, no silly packaging, no nasty chemicals - just great food produced by people who really love what they do.


Our achievements would not have been possible without fantastic IT systems and a dedicated IT team behind them. In addition to using and supporting Microsoft Windows for our client and server infrastructure, we develop and maintain our own bespoke website and other business applications in-house. Across this diverse architecture our internal support team is the first point of call for everything that we need to run the business, and allows us to offer customers a unique service including flexible repeat orders and individually tailored boxes of fresh fruit and veg.


We consider ourselves bold, irreverent, genuine, friendly and honest, representing a refreshing alternative to supermarket shopping, but without being preachy - this is true of our brand and our internal culture, which combines friendliness, supportiveness and humour with outstanding levels of achievement at work.


We're seeking a proactive and experienced API & UI Test Automation Engineer to join our cross-functional Scrum team for a 10 month maternity cover role. You'll be working across both backend and frontend testing, independently and collaboratively, to help elevate the quality of our systems. This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys a challenge, thrives on responsibility, and is passionate about building and maintaining intelligent, maintainable test frameworks.


The role involves designing and implementing robust automated tests for our .NET APIs (all documented using Swagger) as well as automating UI tests using Playwright. You'll collaborate closely with developers and testers to support fast, stable releases for API, web and mobile applications.

Key Responsibilities:

Actively participate in the Scrum process; contribute to sprint planning, reviews, and retrospectives. Analyse API requirements and Swagger definitions to design and implement test cases. Develop, maintain and execute automated tests for RESTful .NET APIs. Develop and maintain automated UI tests (Playwright, Selenium, Appium). Extend and evolve both API and UI testing frameworks to support new functionality. Undertake manual testing where automation is not yet in place or practical. Collaborate closely with developers to understand technical implementations and resolve issues quickly. Identify, document, and track bugs effectively. Ensure comprehensive test coverage across API endpoints and UI journeys. Stay up to date with new testing tools and techniques for both frontend and backend testing. Contribute to the continuous improvement of our testing practices, tools, and strategy.

Experience and Skills:

Essential:

Proven experience in API test automation. Strong hands-on experience automating tests for RESTful APIs using C#. Experience working with API tools such as Swagger, Postman, RestSharp, or similar. Understanding of HTTP methods, status codes, request/response formats, and API authentication (e.g. Bearer tokens, OAuth2). Experience working with JSON and XML formats. Understanding of agile delivery methodologies, preferably Scrum. Excellent written and verbal communication skills, able to collaborate across both technical and non-technical teams.
Desirable:


Familiarity with CI/CD practices and especially integrating test automation into pipelines (Azure DevOps).

Solid experience with UI test automation (Playwright, Selenium, Appium).

Experience writing automated tests using C# testing frameworks such as MSTest.

Experience of testing high-transactional systems or ecommerce APIs.

Experience querying and validating data with SQL (SQL Server and T-SQL preferred).

Exposure to performance/load testing tools for APIs (k6 / Jmeter).

Understanding of broader testing areas such as accessibility, security, or exploratory testing.

Personal Characteristics:

Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical issues to non-technical audiences.

Self-motivated and highly organised, with strong ownership of tasks and follow-through.

Proactive and keen to take initiative -- you enjoy solving problems, digging into detail, and improving what exists.

Comfortable working independently but not afraid to ask for help or collaborate when needed.

Enjoys a challenge and is eager to learn new tools, frameworks, and approaches.

Passionate about testing, quality, and continuous improvement.

Willing to own a problem and see through to resolution

What we offer

Salary of 45,000 (FTE) per annum Working hours are 37.5 per week Fully remote working 33 days holiday, inclusive of bank holidays (FTE) per annum A free box of fruit and veg every week (It's pretty delicious!) Up to 35% discount on A&C products Discounted staff shop Wellbeing and Rewards platform with access to discounts, GP service and Employee Assistance Programme' * Contributory pension scheme