We are looking for an experienced Software Development Engineer in Test with strong engineering skills and a genuine passion for automation, reliability, and building high-quality software.
As a Software Development Engineer in Test, you will design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks that underpin our continuous delivery pipelines. You’ll work closely with engineering, QA, DevOps, product, and architecture teams to ensure our platform is robust, scalable, secure, and production-ready.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering problems, improving testability across the codebase, and driving quality improvements at scale. You’ll help shape our automation strategy, raise engineering standards, and ensure development teams receive fast, reliable feedback throughout the delivery lifecycle.
You will be embedded within a Scrum team, actively contributing to ceremonies, refining requirements, and ensuring stories meet the Definition of Ready and Definition of Done through clear acceptance criteria, strong automation strategies, and effective test coverage.
Key Responsibilities: (Quality Engineering & Automation)
- Design, develop, and maintain automated functional, integration, and regression tests across UI and API layers, using BDD principles.
- Build and maintain performance, load, and volume tests using k6 to validate scalability and system behaviour under stress.
- Create reliable, maintainable automation that runs efficiently within GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
- Continuously improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of test suites, identifying and eliminating flaky tests.
Collaboration & Engineering Practices:
- Collaborate with developers, product owners, and UX to understand system behaviour, user journeys, and edge cases.
- Participate in code reviews to ensure automation quality, consistency, and maintainability.
- Support developers in building testable features through technical design discussions and architectural reviews.
- Contribute to story refinement and define clear, testable acceptance criteria aligned with the Definition of Done.
- Work alongside QA engineers to complement manual and exploratory testing with robust automation.
Platform, Tooling & Infrastructure:
- Partner with DevOps and Platform Engineering to integrate automation into AWS-based, containerised environments.
- Use Pact Broker to manage API contracts and ensure compatibility across distributed services.
- Design and execute chaos experiments using AWS FIS to validate resilience and fault tolerance.
- Ensure test results are visible, actionable, and tightly integrated into GitLab merge requests and CI pipelines.
Quality, Security & Best Practice
- Promote strong engineering practices, including code reviews, static analysis, and security scanning.
- Collaborate with engineering teams to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
- Advocate for code quality, maintainability, and continuous improvement.
- Mentor engineers on test automation, frameworks, debugging techniques, and quality engineering principles.
Actively contribute to the Software Development Engineer in Test - Quality Engineering Community of Practice.
Essential Skills & Experience:
- 4+ years’ experience in software engineering or test automation.
- Strong programming skills in JavaScript/TypeScript and Python.
- Hands-on experience with modern automation tools such as Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Jest, pytest, or similar.
- Experience working with GitLab CI/CD, including pipeline orchestration and analysing merge request test results.
- Strong understanding of API testing (REST/GraphQL), integration testing, and the testing pyramid.
- Experience testing containerised systems using Docker and Testcontainers.
- Ability to debug issues across multiple layers of a distributed system.
- Solid understanding of modern engineering practices, DevOps principles, and continuous delivery.
- Experience working within Agile/Scrum delivery teams.
Desirable:
- Exposure to AI in testing, either through AI-driven quality tools or testing AI-based systems.
- Experience with AWS services such as ECS, Lambda, S3, and CloudWatch.
- Experience with Kubernetes and large-scale microservices architectures.
- Familiarity with contract testing (Pact), performance testing (k6, JMeter), or accessibility testing.
- Knowledge of security testing and standards such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001, or SOC 2.
- Experience with static analysis and security tools (e.g. Semgrep, ESLint, SonarQube, Veracode, JFrog Xray).
- Exposure to microservices, distributed systems, or event-driven architectures.
Our Culture:
Our values are at the heart of everything we do:
- We encourage and support everyone to grow.
- We challenge, listen, and stay open-minded to change and new ideas.
- As trusted advisors, we use our expertise to solve problems and deliver the best outcomes for our clients.
- We take personal ownership and strive for excellence.
- We are welcoming, inclusive, and respectful, embracing diversity and humanity.
- We value creativity, collaboration, and innovation, and we’re excited to welcome someone who shares these values.
Join Us:
As a Software Development Engineer in Test, you will help accelerate delivery while increasing confidence and stability across our products. You’ll play a key role in building a culture of shared quality ownership and ensuring our automation strategy supports a fast-moving, cloud-based engineering organisation.
If you’re an innovator who enjoys solving complex challenges and is passionate about helping customers deliver exceptional service, we’d love to hear from you.
Benefits include:
- Bereavement leave
- Casual dress
- Company pension
- Free flu jabs
- Free and on-site parking
- Referral programme
- Sick pay
- Work from home
If you want, I can also:
- Make this more senior/lead-leaning
- Shorten it for LinkedIn or a job board
- Adjust tone (more startup / more enterprise)
- Align it to a specific Software Development Engineer in Test level or salary band
Position: Software Development Test Engineer - Job Type: Full-time, Permanent - Salary: From £50,000 per year
Location: Hybrid remote – Hemel Hempstead
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