A Dubai-based QA team is hiring a Senior Manual Testing Engineer to join its testing group in Dubai Internet City. The role is full-time and on-site, within the broader QA and testing function that supports product releases across several client accounts. Several established firms in Dubai Internet City are currently competing for manual testing engineer talent at this level, which has pushed compensation and benefits for senior candidates noticeably higher than they were even two or three years ago.
The team is looking for someone who has spent real time in the trenches of manual test execution, not someone stepping into their first QA role. Eight years of hands-on manual testing experience is the baseline expectation, built across enough release cycles that test planning, defect triage, and stakeholder pushback no longer feel unfamiliar. On the education side, a four-year undergraduate degree in a computing-adjacent discipline is the minimum bar, and the team also wants to see a recognized testing credential like ISTQB on the resume, not just years of unstructured on-the-job learning.
What the work actually looks like
Day to day, this engineer owns test case design from requirements through execution and is expected to catch gaps in a spec before they turn into production incidents. The core responsibilities are:
- Designing and writing test cases based on functional and business requirements, then executing them across each release cycle
- Identifying, documenting, and reporting software defects with enough detail that developers can reproduce and fix them without a back-and-forth
- Verifying fixes before release sign-off, including regression passes on adjacent features that a change might have touched
- Working directly with developers throughout the sprint to flag quality risks early rather than waiting for a formal test cycle
One thing worth being upfront about: release weeks tend to compress the timeline for all of the above. A defect found two days before go-live still needs a clear write-up, a severity call, and a conversation with the developer who owns that area of the codebase, and there generally isn't extra runway to do it. Candidates who are comfortable making judgment calls under that kind of pressure, without needing to escalate every decision, tend to do well on this team.
Skills the team is hiring for
The required skill set for this posting is:
- Test case design, including boundary and edge-case thinking, not just happy-path scripts
- Manual testing across functional, regression, and UAT cycles
- Defect tracking in a shared tool, with clear reproduction steps and severity judgment
- Genuine attention to detail, particularly on the kind of small UI or data inconsistencies that are easy to skim past
Nice to have, not required
None of the following will disqualify a strong candidate who lacks them, but they do help an application stand out. Exposure to a test management tool such as JIRA or TestRail is useful, since most documentation work happens there. Some familiarity with basic automation concepts, even without hands-on scripting, helps when the team eventually hands off repetitive regression checks to a script. And prior work in a regulated or client-facing industry, where test evidence sometimes needs to be defensible to an external auditor, is a plus rather than a requirement.
Compensation and what comes with it
The monthly salary for this position is AED 21,500, paid tax-free, which is fairly typical for senior QA hires in Dubai Internet City right now. Beyond the base pay, the role includes:
- Health insurance coverage
- Paid time off
- Performance-linked annual bonuses
- Employer-sponsored UAE visa, since this is an on-site position based in Dubai
Tax-free salary structures are one of the more concrete reasons experienced testers keep looking at manual testing engineer jobs in Dubai rather than comparable roles elsewhere in the region; net take-home tends to land meaningfully higher for the same nominal figure.
Team and setup
Naukri Mitra has posted this role on behalf of a QA function that runs lean by design, so a senior tester here carries real ownership rather than sitting under three layers of sign-off. The office is on-site in Dubai Internet City, and the workplace type is not remote or hybrid, so this suits someone who wants to be embedded with the developers and product owners they're testing for, not someone looking for a distributed setup. Cross-functional friction is lower when testers and developers are in the same room during a defect discussion, and that's a big part of why the role is structured this way.
Career growth from here typically runs toward a QA lead or test manager track, though that depends on team size and how the client portfolio shifts over the next year or two. It's not guaranteed, but it's the realistic path for someone who spends a couple of years doing this well.
Applying
Applicants should be prepared to walk through a past defect they caught that others missed, and to explain the reasoning behind a test case design decision, not just describe the process in general terms. Experienced professionals already working in Dubai's QA market, and candidates relocating from elsewhere with a comparable background, are both welcome to apply. Interviews are scheduled on a rolling basis, and candidates who can start within four to six weeks of an offer are given priority, given the team's current workload.
