Senior QA Automation Engineer

We are IceWarp. For 20+ years we've been building a communication and collaboration platform that tens of millions of people open every morning. We've been cheerfully poking Google and Microsoft in the ribs the whole time, and honestly? It's been fun.

Now we're looking for someone to make quality a first-class engineering discipline at IceWarp. Someone who's ready for what's coming with AI or without it.

Why we are hiring:

When you run a platform at our scale, quality is the product. "It mostly works" doesn't fly when 50+ million mailboxes depend on you.

Right now our testing is roughly 60% manual, 40% automated. We want to fix that ratio and we want you to be the one who fixes it.

You'll join as a peer to our developers. No ticket queue to grind through. Just a real, meaty challenge: push automation coverage up across the pipeline and help the whole team ship faster, with confidence.

What you will own:

Outcomes. Not outputs.

• Automated test coverage. UI, API, integration across the full product, from web client to backend. Stable, readable, maintainable. Not a flaky pile that nobody trusts.

• Shifting the 60/40 balance. You own moving that line. Automate the regression and critical paths that eat the most time. Make the manual work surgical.

• Test automation in CI/CD. Suites wired into GitLab and TeamCity, kept fast and green. A red build should mean something real — not "probably fine, let it go."

• Unblocking developers. When a dev needs a test harness, a tricky integration covered, or help reproducing a nasty bug — you're who they call. You don't write their features; you make it safe for them to ship.

• Keeping automation honest. Flake-rate cleanup, test maintenance, environment setup, reporting. Not the headline, but absolutely part of owning quality.

Where you spike:

This isn't a generalist tester role. It isn't a lead role either. We're hiring for a specific shape.

• Strong automation engineering instincts. You've built test suites other engineers actually depend on. You think about maintainability, structure, and second-order effects. You enjoy the work most people find boring (flake hunting, pipeline reliability, test infra), because you've seen what happens when nobody owns it.

• Manual + automation depth. Your core is automation, but you know manual and exploratory testing well enough to decide what's worth automating and what isn't.

• A product brain. You read a feature spec and already know what's load-bearing, what's decoration, and what's going to bite someone in six months.

• Tool-pragmatic. Our current stack is Python for backend, Playwright + TypeScript for frontend, and Python + Appium with emulators for mobile. It works well, and we're not married to it - if you see a better way, make the case. We'll listen.

What the team watches:

No personal scorecard. But you should know what good looks like here.

• Automation coverage - and how it moves over time.

• Pipeline health on master - green is the default, not a quarterly achievement.

• Flake rate - because bad signal is worse than no signal.

• Change failure rate - how often a merge breaks something a user notices.

• Escaped bugs - how much slips through that shouldn't. We're honest about where we are.

Who you are:

If two or more of these don't land, this probably isn't the right fit. Better to know now.

• You take ownership. You spot a quality risk, you take it on. No waiting around for someone else to flag it.

• You think "I want users to trust this product" before "I want to use the trendiest framework."

• Partner, not gatekeeper. You build quality in alongside developers, not at the end, not as a checkpoint.

• You disagree well. You push back on "let's ship it anyway" when there's real risk, and you do it without drama.

• Feedback culture is second nature. Clear, reproducible bug reports. Positive intent assumed. We focus on how things broke, not who broke them.

• You default to async. Write it down. Document the why. Public channel over DM so the whole team can find what was decided.

• You commit. Push hard before the call. Execute cleanly after.

Who you will be working with (and climbing with):

• A quick note about the team you'd join. Our founder is a serious climber. Tomáš, who leads the QA team, loves climbing too. We're not saying there's a pattern. We're not not saying it either. :)

• And it's not just talk. Every Wednesday (at least) someone from the office goes climbing at Hudy sport, right around the corner. Whoever is around and feels like it just comes along. No sign-up, no pressure, everyone's welcome.

• So if you enjoy climbing too, that's a big plus, probably our least serious hiring criterion, but still a plus. You'd have people to climb with, and maybe even someone who belays you and reviews your code (not at the same time).

• Never climbed before? No problem at all. You don't need to be good at it to get the job, your tests just need to be green. But don't be surprised if someone invites you along on a Wednesday.

What we are not asking for:

• Not a management role. You'll be hands-on in automation yourself - no team leading, no mentoring load.

• Not X years with a specific tool. If you've built serious automation and can pick up our stack quickly, that's enough.

• Not a ticket-executor. If you're looking for a backlog of test cases to work through, this isn't it.

• Not email/messaging domain experience. IMAP and SMTP are learnable. Taking users' trust seriously isn't. We do expect that from day one.

What we offer:

We're a Czech company challenging giants 100x our size. We can't match Big Tech comp packages, and we don't pretend to. Here's what we do offer:

• Work on a Czech product used by millions worldwide (your work has a real impact)

• Freedom to bring new ideas and ship them right now

• Hybrid: 3 days/week in-office, flexible hours

• Office in Karlín, directly at Křižíkova metro station

• 20 days of vacation (+4 via KPI System)

• 5 Personal days

• Daily snacks and office-paid lunches twice a week