Senior Agentic Quality Engineer
topdesk · Delft, ZH, nl ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Contract
- Category
- Industrial engineering
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Company size
- 501-1000
topdesk · Delft, ZH, nl ·
Senior engineer building agentic test systems: you design automated test suites, use Claude Code to generate and repair tests, and lead the team’s shift toward AI-driven quality engineering while keeping human accountability.
About the role
As a Senior Agentic Quality Engineer, you do high-quality test engineering on a platform team, working agentically with Claude Code as your primary collaborator — and you help teammates get better at it.
This is a senior IC position. You design and own automated test suites across your team's interfaces, and you lead TOPdesk's move up the testing-maturity curve. You are a specialist and enabler — building quality capabilities and test infrastructure, tackling the hard cross-interface and non-functional risks, and helping engineers own quality. Product engineers and their teams remain accountable for the quality of what they build; you are not a downstream testing gate.
We think of quality maturity as a progression: manual testing → hand-writing test automation → writing that automation with AI → bounded agents that observe code changes, generate and repair tests, and help keep suites green. More autonomy is not inherently better — the right level depends on the risk. Agent-generated tests and repairs stay traceable to intended behaviour, suspicious changes are escalated, changes to expected behaviour need human approval, and controls prevent agents from weakening assertions just to make a test pass. Most of the industry sits low on that curve; your job is to move us up it responsibly — and bring your teammates with you.
What this is not A manual-QA or test-script-maintenance role, a downstream testing gate, or a role that stops at AI-assisted test writing. You build the agentic quality systems — bounded agents that observe, generate, and repair under human accountability — and you help the team own quality, rather than owning it for them.
The team
You join a platform or product team, reporting to an Engineering Manager. The team owns a coherent area of the product and exposes interfaces other teams depend on — so correctness, contract stability, and clear failure isolation are central to everything you test.
What you'll do
The work spans three distinct problems, and you keep them clear: testing agentic product behaviour, using agents to test conventional software, and building the agentic quality infrastructure that supports both.
Quality engineering
Design and maintain automated test suites across your team's interfaces and surfaces.
Write integration and contract tests that validate the interfaces your team provides to others — focused on correctness, schema stability, and clear failure isolation.
Bring advanced quality practices where they earn their place: property-based testing, fuzzing, mutation testing, contract testing, non-functional testing, and production-quality signals.
Assess non-functional risks: performance regressions, data consistency, access control, sensitive-data handling, migration safety, backward compatibility.
Investigate failing builds: triage root cause, distinguish product bugs from test brittleness, clarify ownership across team boundaries.
Work with Claude, stay accountable
Use Claude Code as your primary collaborator for generating tests, investigating failures, proposing fixes, and drafting multi-file change sets.
Write briefs, acceptance criteria, and CLAUDE.md conventions that Claude can execute against without further clarification; use subagents and MCP tools to go beyond single-shot prompting.
Build evals and headless agent runs in CI that catch regressions automatically — not just tests a human triggers.
Review and approve Claude-generated test suites before they merge — verify correctness, coverage, traceability to intended behaviour, and that assertions were not weakened just to pass; escalate suspicious changes and require human approval for any change to expected behaviour.
Build reusable prompting patterns and context conventions for test generation in the codebase.
Contribute to the quality journey
Share what works in agentic quality engineering through demos, retros, documentation, and conversation.
Contribute to shared quality standards: validation artefacts on AI-assisted PRs, CI quality gates, coverage expectations.
Surface where agentic approaches could reduce test toil or improve coverage.
Help engineers own quality and move the team up the testing-maturity curve — beyond manual and AI-assisted test writing toward bounded agents that observe changes, write and repair tests, and help keep suites green — matching autonomy to risk and never lowering the quality bar.
Technical environment
Claude Code is our current primary agentic engineering environment: agents may plan and execute within defined constraints and governed environments, while engineers stay accountable for problem framing, architecture, acceptance criteria, security, verification, and production outcomes. Agent-generated work is backed by automated tests, runtime checks, reviewable evidence, and risk-based human approval — we match deterministic automation, structured workflows, or agents to the nature and risk of the task rather than maximising autonomy for its own sake.
Stack: Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure, Kubernetes; cloud-native / service-oriented architecture; Terraform-managed infrastructure — the exact mix depends on your team.
Mechanisms: subagents, MCP tool integrations, multi-agent workflows, and shared prompt, agent, and eval libraries.
Success in your first year
Healthy automated suites across your team's interfaces, kept healthy as it evolves.
Contract and integration coverage that catches breakages before consuming teams do.
Reusable agentic test-generation patterns and evals adopted in the codebase and CI.
Teammates are measurably better at agentic quality engineering because of how you work.
Required
5+ years in test or quality engineering with ownership of automated test suites across a team or service.
Strong API and integration testing skills — the team's output is almost entirely interfaces.
Hands-on Claude Code experience — test generation, failure analysis, multi-file editing; not just autocomplete.
CI/CD fluency — writing and maintaining quality gates, not just running them.
Writes acceptance criteria that leave no ambiguity for implementation or for Claude to execute against.
Comfort with data-adjacent testing: databases, data integrity, consistency, and API contracts.
Fluent English for clear communication with engineers, product stakeholders, and other teams.
Nice to have
Contract testing or consumer-driven contract patterns.
SQL for test-data setup and assertion.
Security-aware testing: secrets management, sensitive-data handling, compliance contexts.
Search-engine testing: relevance, edge cases, performance.
Experience contributing to a team's AI tooling adoption.
What's in it for you
A strong focus on personal development — including, in the Netherlands, our “10 to Grow” programme: 10% of your time and budget for your own growth.
A hybrid working environment built on freedom, trust, and responsibility.
An open, informal, and supportive culture, with collaboration across national borders.
Excellent employment conditions.
Want to apply?
Does this sound like your next step? Apply with your CV and a short motivation letter via the application form. Tell us, with an example, how you gave both people and technical direction to a team — and what it shipped as a result.