Senior QA Engineer

Senior QA Engineer - Nando's Point of Sale & Kitchen Management System (NPOS & NKMS)

Overall Ambition

Help shape the future of Nando's at-counter customer and employee experience by building quality into every stage of delivery. You'll play a key role in ensuring our Point of Sale and Kitchen Management platforms are reliable, accessible, performant and resilient for millions of customers and Nandocas across the globe.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer to join our passionate, lean, agile, fast-growing and evolving technology team on a permanent basis.

You'll be an experienced QA professional who enjoys solving complex technical challenges and driving quality across every stage of the software development lifecycle. You'll take ownership of quality strategy across our Point of Sale and Kitchen Management products, combining hands-on hardware validation, modern testing practices and release governance to ensure exceptional customer and restaurant experiences.

Living the Nando's Values

As a Nandoca, you'll embody the values that make Nando's unique.

Pride - Take ownership of your work, hold yourself to high standards and care deeply about delivering quality outcomes.

Passion - Bring energy, curiosity and enthusiasm to solving problems and creating exceptional customer experiences.

Courage - Challenge the status quo, embrace change and make informed decisions, even when faced with uncertainty.

Integrity - Act with honesty, transparency and accountability in everything you do.

Family - Collaborate openly, support your teammates and contribute to an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive.

These values shape how we work together, make decisions and build technology that moves Nando's forward.

The Role

As a Senior QA Engineer, you'll define and lead the quality strategy across our Point of Sale and Kitchen Management platforms, ensuring every release meets the highest standards before reaching our restaurants.

This is a hands-on senior role focused on quality engineering rather than simply writing automated tests. You'll own test planning, release validation, hardware testing, production quality and continuous improvement across multiple products.

You'll work closely with Software Engineers, Product Managers and Technical Leads to ensure quality is built into every stage of delivery, balancing speed with stability as we deliver software to restaurants around the world.

You'll enjoy reproducing complex production issues, validating software on physical hardware and identifying opportunities to improve our overall testing approach. You'll also champion modern QA practices, AI-assisted testing where appropriate and continuous improvement across the engineering organisation.

About the Point of Sale & Kitchen Management Team

Our mission is to transform the at-counter experience for both Customers and Nandocas by replacing legacy Point of Sale providers with a best-in-class platform built by Nando's.

This is a largely greenfield programme that will become the backbone of Nando's ordering technology, integrating seamlessly with our digital ordering and Kitchen Management platforms.

Although based in the UK, the platform supports restaurants globally across the UK, South Africa, Australia and the USA, creating exciting engineering challenges around localisation, configurability and operational resilience.

Our software powers restaurant tills, kitchen displays, payment devices and ordering workflows where reliability is business critical. Every release directly impacts restaurant operations, making quality engineering fundamental to our success.

Responsibilities

• Define and lead the quality strategy across our Point of Sale and Kitchen Management products.
• Design, execute and continuously improve comprehensive test plans for restaurant hardware and software.
• Perform hands-on manual validation across Windows and Android Point of Sale devices, kitchen screens, receipt printers and payment terminals.
• Own release validation activities and ensure production readiness before deployment.
• Monitor post-release stability and rapidly investigate, reproduce and resolve production issues.
• Work closely with Software Engineers to improve testability, quality and release confidence throughout development.
• Build and maintain automated testing using modern frameworks including Playwright and Maestro where appropriate.
• Support API, integration, end-to-end, accessibility, regression and performance testing activities.
• Contribute to test management using Testmo and help drive continuous improvements across our quality processes.
• Use monitoring, observability and production insights to improve platform reliability and customer experience.
• Champion accessibility, resilience and operational excellence as core engineering principles.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, including AI-assisted testing approaches, where they deliver measurable value.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• Significant experience leading QA strategy for modern web, desktop or mobile applications.
• Strong hands-on manual testing experience across physical Windows and Android hardware.
• Experience testing customer-facing or operational business-critical applications.
• Experience creating comprehensive test plans and release validation strategies.
• Strong understanding of functional, integration, regression, accessibility, API and performance testing.
• Experience with modern automation frameworks such as Playwright and/or Maestro.
• Experience testing Flutter applications.
• Familiarity with JSON payloads, API validation and backend integrations.
• Experience with test management platforms such as Testmo or similar.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience working within Agile software development teams.
• Enthusiasm for embracing AI-assisted testing as part of the engineering workflow.

Desirable

• Experience using BrowserStack or similar real-device testing platforms.
• Experience with visual regression tools such as Percy.
• Experience with LogRocket, Grafana or similar observability platforms.
• Exposure to performance testing tools such as k6 or Gatling.
• Experience working with Google Cloud Platform.
• Understanding of SQL databases and backend services.
• Experience working with restaurant technology, retail systems or hardware-integrated applications.

You'll Be

• Collaborative, constructive and empathetic in how you work with others.
• Pragmatic in balancing quality, delivery speed and long-term maintainability.
• Passionate about creating reliable, accessible experiences for customers and restaurant teams.
• Comfortable influencing engineering teams without direct authority.
• Someone who leaves teams, products and engineering practices better than they found them.

Everyone is Welcome

At Nando's, everyone is welcome.

Inspired by our Southern African heritage, we know and value the richness that diversity brings to Nando's.

We're committed to creating an inclusive and respectful culture for all, including our existing and future Nandocas, partners and suppliers, customers and the communities we are part of.

We deliberately work hard to create an environment where every individual is valued, respected and can flourish regardless of who they are, their background or outlook on life.

We welcome applications from a diverse range of individuals and will consider any reasonable adjustments to enable candidates to perform at their best throughout the recruitment process.