Growth-stage European equities exchange and MTF. London.
The exchange was scaling its engineering team and needed QA capacity to keep pace with release velocity, against live delivery deadlines on a regulated trading venue.
The salary was fixed below the London market rate for QA engineers carrying both real automation depth and capital markets domain experience. That exact combination, at that number, did not exist in the open market in any volume worth waiting for.
The obvious search, domain-expert testers who already knew exchange infrastructure, would have run for months and delivered nothing inside budget.
A fixed budget sitting below market rate for the profile as briefed, ruling out most candidates with both automation and exchange experience.
The market was full of manual testers carrying automation job titles. Most of the candidates reviewed were rejected for lacking the primary skillset.
Genuine exchange-infrastructure testers were out of budget. Holding out for domain expertise would have stalled the search indefinitely.
Three roles open at once against active deadlines on a regulated venue. The hires had to be right, and they had to be quick.