About Bark

Bark is an online services marketplace connecting customers with professionals across over 1,000 categories. Operating in nine countries including the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, we're transforming how people find trusted service providers for everything from home improvement to professional services.

Our platform uses cutting-edge technology to match customers with the right professionals quickly and efficiently. With a global team of over 220 people, we're currently undergoing an exciting transformation: migrating from a lead generation model to a full marketplace platform with subscription based pricing.

As a profitable, PE backed scale up (EMK Capital), Bark offers the best of both worlds: the agility and innovation of a fast moving business combined with financial stability and resources for growth. We recently launched our new marketplace model in Australia (Q4 2025) and are preparing for rollout to the UK and US markets in 2026. You'll have genuine ownership, responsibility, and the opportunity to shape our commercial strategy during a pivotal transformation phase with the chance to make your own contribution to our journey.

About the role

*Please note you must be based in Spain to be considered for this fully remote role

We're looking for a Senior SDET II to join our Core Engineering (CENG) squad, the team responsible for some of the most critical systems at Bark: payments, billing, email, search (Elasticsearch), and a wide range of backend APIs and services that the rest of the product depends on.

This is a systems-first role. The work CENG does rarely has a frontend, and the most important quality work here happens at the service level: API behaviour, data integrity, payment and billing edge cases, search relevance, and the interactions between complex backend systems. You'll be someone who reads backend code to understand what's actually happening, writes tests that reflect real system behaviour, and can reason clearly about how these services fail and what the correct state looks like.

Beyond the squad work, this role carries real chapter-level responsibility. You'll be the one of the main people driving quality engineering innovation across the company: setting the direction for how we adopt AI tooling, building out our performance and synthetic monitoring capabilities, and helping the wider QE chapter grow technically. This isn't a title that comes with the expectation of staying in your lane. We want someone who sees the whole picture and actively shapes it.

You'll be embedded in the CENG (Core Engine) squad, working closely with backend engineers from design through to production, while also contributing to the QE chapter and QE Guild in a way that meaningfully moves both forward.

Responsibilities

• Design and run white-box, systems-first automated tests across our backend services: APIs, payments, billing, search, and email, including async and event-driven flows, background jobs, and failure scenarios that never surface in a browser.

• Partner with backend engineers early to close testability gaps in system design, data flows, and service boundaries.

• Own our performance testing capability: design and execute load, stress, and soak tests (K6, JMeter, or Locust), define SLA thresholds, and turn results into actionable engineering work.

• Build and maintain synthetic monitoring in Datadog and Grafana for always-on coverage of critical production behaviour, and use SQL to validate system state across payments, billing, search, and email.

• Integrate tests into CI/CD and strengthen observability and alerting so quality signals are clear and actionable.

• Drive adoption of AI tooling across the QE chapter, applying LLMs and agentic approaches to test planning, execution, and failure triage to make the team genuinely more effective.

• Lead in the QE Guild: run tech-sharing sessions, mentor across squads, and set the standard for the chapter.

Required Skills and Experience

• 7+ years in SDET / Quality Engineering with a substantial backend focus, and a track record of driving QE practice, not just executing within it.

• Strong API testing at the integration and contract level.

• Performance testing against real backend systems (K6, JMeter, Locust): you can design tests, set meaningful thresholds, and interpret results.

• Hands-on Datadog synthetic monitoring.

• Ability to read and reason about backend code to decide what to test and why.

• Experience testing async / event-driven systems, eventual consistency, message queues, and assertions that don't depend on timing luck.

• Strong SQL for data validation, test data setup, and investigation.

• Practical experience applying AI to QE work. You understand how LLMs behave and can put agentic tooling to real use in a testing context.

• Working TypeScript across Cypress and Playwright, and Python for scripting and PR review.

• Strong communicator and mentor who raises the bar beyond a single squad.

Desirable skills and experience

• Hands-on experience building with MCP servers and agentic test workflows, tools that read Jira, generate test plans, execute autonomously, and write results back.

• Consumer-driven contract testing or service virtualisation.

• Background in payments and billing systems, including testing payment flows and edge cases.

• Experience testing search systems, ideally Elasticsearch, including relevance, ranking, and query correctness.

• Familiarity with email delivery testing across transactional and marketing flows.

• Experience testing in multi-region or multi-locale environments.

• Broader backend language exposure (PHP or deeper Python).

Interview Process

• Screening Call with Talent Partner (30 mins)

• 1st Stage - Take home task

• 2nd Stage - Paired programming task (90 mins)

• 3rd Stage - Values interview (30/45 mins)

Diversity Statement

At Bark, we are a platform for people, revolutionising the way professionals and individuals connect since 2014. Our culture is defined by excitement, ambition, and a commitment to raising the bar. We value diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) and are dedicated to embedding these principles into everything we do. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive, and our focus is on hiring, retaining and developing a globally diverse workforce that is passionate about excelling our platform and supporting our customers succeed. Be part of our dynamic team, where bold ideas thrive, and create a future worth shouting about.