Senior System Tester/SC Cleared & NPPV3

Role: Senior System Tester
Location: Hybrid – Solihul, UK (2 days a week) with occasional travel to Croydon
Work Mode: 6 – 12 Months Contract
JOB DESCRITION:
About the Role:
As a Senior System Tester, you will take a leading role in ensuring the quality, reliability, and performance of complex, mission‑critical systems within one of the UK’s most significant government digital transformation programmes. You will guide testing strategy, mentor junior testers, and work closely with multidisciplinary teams to embed a culture of quality, automation, and continuous improvement.
You will be responsible for designing robust test frameworks, driving automation-first practices, and ensuring that services meet stringent functional and non‑functional requirements. This role requires deep technical expertise across modern testing tools, backend validation, and service‑based architectures, along with the ability to influence, challenge, and lead teams toward high‑quality delivery.
Key Responsibilities:
Candidate must have the Valid SC Clearace & NPPV3
• Lead the design, development, and maintenance of automated test suites using JUnit, Cucumber, and Selenium
• Own system, integration, regression, and end‑to‑end testing across distributed and microservice‑based applications.
• Conduct advanced backend validation and data integrity checks using PostgreSQL, including complex query analysis.
• Use WireMock to design sophisticated mocks and stubs for external service simulation.
• Collaborate with engineering teams building Spring‑based applications to ensure testability, quality gates, and robust engineering practices.
• Lead performance and load testing using JMeter, interpreting results and advising on system optimisation.
• Facilitate workshops, technical discussions, and quality reviews with stakeholders across engineering, product, and operations.
• Manage and prioritise defects, risks, and issues, ensuring clear communication and timely resolution.
• Mentor and support junior testers, promoting best practices in automation, CI/CD integration, and quality engineering.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives across testing processes, tooling, and delivery workflows.
Essential Skills and Experience:
• Extensive hands‑on experience with JUnit, Cucumber, and Selenium WebDriver in complex system environments.
• Strong understanding of Spring applications, microservices, and distributed architectures.
• Advanced proficiency with PostgreSQL, including query optimisation and data validation techniques.
• Deep experience using WireMock for service virtualisation and integration isolation.
• Strong expertise with JMeter for performance, load, and stress testing.
• Proven experience leading testing activities within agile delivery teams.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines and tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
Desired Skills and Experience:
• Experience testing microservices at scale, including contract testing approaches.
• Exposure to containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Understanding of BDD/TDD practices and quality‑driven engineering.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK).
• Experience working in consultancy or government digital delivery environments.
• Strong organisational skills and the ability to lead testing independently while supporting team collaboration