Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Working Pattern: On-site, 5 days per week
Type: Permanent, full-time
Salary: Competitive tax-free package, dependent on experience
Relocation: Full relocation support, visa sponsorship and family status available
Company: Established defence technology developer (name shared at first conversation)
Tektora are supporting an established defence technology client in Abu Dhabi as they build out the R&D function behind a sovereign communications and signals programme. This is a software test engineering role, and a genuinely modern one — the team is not looking for someone to maintain a legacy Selenium suite, they want an automation engineer who is already using AI to change how testing gets done.
Relocation to Abu Dhabi is required. This is an on-site R&D environment and the role cannot be performed remotely. The package is tax-free, relocation is fully supported, and the client has moved engineers and their families from Europe and Asia into this programme before.
This role would suit
A Python-strong test automation engineer or SDET with 5+ years behind them who owns their automation suite end to end, is comfortable in Linux and CI/CD rather than only in a test framework, and who has already started pulling LLMs and AI agents into test generation, triage and debugging. Background can be commercial software, telecoms or embedded — defence experience is welcome but not required for this one.
The Role
You will own the complete lifecycle of the automation suite: writing the test suites, checking results, reporting issues and chasing them through to closure. Alongside that you will build and improve the CI/CD pipeline itself, push automated testing further into the delivery pipeline, and act as an advocate for DevOps practice across an R&D team that is still forming its habits.
The distinctive part of the brief is the AI element. The client wants AI-driven testing tools integrated into the existing frameworks and pipelines, LLMs used to generate test cases and predict defects, and ML models built to predict system errors and deployment failures before they surface. You will be given room to decide how that is done.
Key Experience Required
- Strong Python, used for building and maintaining automation frameworks rather than scripting alone
- CI/CD tooling — Jenkins, TeamCity, GitLab Pipelines or equivalent — built and maintained, not just consumed
- Confident working in Linux as a primary environment
- Git version control
- Debian package management
- Practical experience integrating AI-driven testing tools and using Large Language Models to support test case generation and defect prediction
- Use of AI assistants, AI agents or ML models to accelerate framework development and debug complex scenarios
- Strong analytical and problem-solving ability, and the ownership to report an issue and see it fixed
Desirable Experience
- Building ML models for error or deployment-failure prediction
- Infrastructure-as-code and containerised test environments
- Hardware-in-the-loop or embedded test experience
- Exposure to defence, telecoms or safety-critical delivery
Interested?
Send your CV through and we will come back to you with the client name, the programme detail and the full package before anything is submitted anywhere. Candidates will be screened for nationality and location eligibility against the client's own requirements at the first conversation — we will be straight with you about that up front rather than waste your time.
Tektora — defence, aerospace and secure communications recruitment across the UK, Europe and the UAE.
