Retarus is a worldwide provider of cloud-based messaging solutions at enterprise scale. We serve over 40% of the companies listed on the S&P Global 100, e.g. Adidas, Bayer, SAP, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, T-Systems, Swarovski & UPS, as well as governmental agencies and major players in markets across the world. Privately owned and founder-managed for over thirty years, Retarus is customer-oriented, stable, a fair employer, and a strategic business partner with a long-term vision. With some 500 employees in 19 offices on four continents, Retarus operates locally and thinks globally: our teams are organized across borders and are highly integrated. This makes Retarus a multicultural, multilingual, and engaging workplace. We are committed to creating a diverse and dynamic environment for our employees, with generous compensation, time off, and a global, collaborative workplace.

• Mobile working and flexible working time
• Collaborative, diverse company culture and superior team spirit
• Flat hierarchies and great feedback culture
• Development opportunities & career perspective
• International business & cross-site collaboration
• Modern, dog-friendly offices with nice amenities
• Company-paid health insurance, public transportation, lunch vouchers and further benefits

Quality Strategy & Shift-Left Integration

• Own the Business Logic: Partner with product owners, functional analysts, QA peers, and developers to dissect workflows, identify edge cases, and challenge assumptions before a single line of code is written.
• Architect the QA Plan: Assess existing coverage and constraints to establish a risk-based strategy encompassing exploratory, integration, and E2E testing.
• Mentor & Elevate the QA Team: Act as the technical anchor for fellow QA engineers. Guide their daily testing efforts, ensure strict alignment with the overarching QA strategy, and continuously upskill the team on modern automation practices.
• Make Quality Visible: Build coverage matrices and dashboards that clearly communicate release confidence, testing gaps, and risks to both technical and business stakeholders.

Hands-On Automation & Engineering

• Bridge Cross-Functional Environments: Partner directly with DevOps and Backend QA teams to eliminate environment discrepancies, resolve complex cross-domain test data constraints, and ensure unbroken end-to-end test coverage across the full product stack.
• Build Resilient Automation: Develop and maintain reliable E2E tests using Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript), alongside targeted API and integration suites. Focus strictly on high-value, repeatable scenarios.
• Co-drive Testability & Best Practices: Modify application components directly to ensure reliable test targeting (e.g., injecting data-testid attributes), and lead technical discussions with the team on how to maximize Playwright’s API capabilities.
• Navigate Enterprise Reality: Design effective testing approaches when test data is scarce, shared, or inconsistent using synthetic data, mocks, and stubs.
• CI/CD & Pipeline Health: Collaborate with the Tech Lead to integrate test execution into CI/CD pipelines, aggressively investigate failures, and eradicate flaky tests.

Continuous Improvement via Telemetry & AI

• Leverage Production Data: Use production telemetry (Sentry), reported incidents, and security findings to continuously patch regression gaps and adapt the testing strategy.
• Multiply Impact with AI: Utilize JetBrains AI to accelerate test code development, analyze specifications, and identify missing test scenarios.

Success in your first 6 months looks like:

We give you the space to succeed. You will be shielded from standard sprint deliverables so you can shadow the scrum team, absorb our business rules, and build relationships. 

This period is your runway to demonstrate a proactive attitude, great analytical skills, and tangible progress in shaping our QA roadmap.

And as soon as possible:

• A validated understanding of our critical business workflows and their associated risks.
• A highly visible baseline of our existing test coverage, gaps, and data constraints.
• An agreed-upon QA strategy with clear priorities actively being implemented.
• Reliable automated tests guarding our most critical production scenarios.
• Demonstrable improvements to test reliability and test data handling.

• A university degree in Computer Engineering/Science or equivalent education, career changers with passion for IT are also welcome.
• 6+ years of professional experience in a comparable position.
• Engineering Foundation: Proven hands-on experience developing automated test suites with Playwright (TypeScript/JavaScript) and testing complex APIs.
• Strategic Mindset: Experience transitioning a team from ad-hoc testing to a structured QA strategy with clear priorities and acceptance criteria.
• Domain Agility: Strong curiosity and a demonstrated ability to rapidly translate complex business rules into structured test scenarios.
• Pragmatic Problem Solving: High resourcefulness in restricted environments or when dealing with legacy test data limitations.
• Modern Tooling: Working knowledge of Git, PR workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and practical experience using AI tools to optimize daily workflows.
• Communication: The ability to distill complex technical risks and coverage gaps into clear insights for diverse audiences.

At Retarus, you will work on impactful and dynamic projects, with real opportunities to make a difference. Our customers are leaders across diverse industries, with constantly evolving needs and high expectations. You’ll be working with cutting-edge technology and great creative leeway to meet customers’ needs – and the projects you work on will be deployed globally. Working at Retarus, you will collaborate closely with convivial, culturally diverse teammates. You will grow professionally in a dynamic and exciting workplace and design impactful solutions in real time with top companies.

Very important

Come as you are. Retarus is committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity, or veteran status.

Apply via our online application portal – it’s easy and doesn’t take long. Our colleague Felix Gansmeier is happy to field any questions you may have: Felix.Gansmeier@retarus.de

We’re looking forward to getting to know you!