Test and SDET Recruitment

As release cycles shorten, testing has moved from a phase at the end to a discipline that runs through delivery. Consortia recruits across the testing spectrum: manual and exploratory testers, QA engineers, test automation engineers and software development engineers in test (SDETs), who build the test tooling other engineers rely on.

The titles blur, so we pay attention to what someone actually does. An SDET writing test tooling in the product's own language is a software engineer with a quality specialism, and is hired like one. Automation is now expected inside most QA engineer and SDET roles. Purely manual roles are fewer, though strong exploratory testers remain valued in complex products.

How we recruit test and SDET specialists

The first thing we ask is what the hire will spend their week doing. A team that needs someone to design test frameworks is hiring an engineer. A team that needs careful exploratory testing of a complex product is hiring a different person. The job title rarely tells us which, so we ask what the person will build, test and own.

We assess automation depth, how comfortable a candidate is with build and release pipelines and the harder skill of knowing what is worth testing.

We approach proven automation engineers directly, through the engineering network we have built since 2010, and shortlist against the brief. Pay is settled early. SDETs are often paid like software engineers, and a role pitched too low tends to stall hiring. We recruit test and SDET specialists on permanent and contract terms across the UK, Europe, the US and the UAE.