Lead Test Engineer (Principal SDET)
We're looking for a Lead Test Engineer for our public sector client with locations across Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle on an initial 12-month contract, paying up to £640 per day (Inside IR35). This role requires 60% office attendance per week.
Responsibilities:
- Hands‑on technical leader with an automation‑first mindset, setting direction and rolling up sleeves to deliver.
- Define and embed a scalable test strategy across multiple delivery teams, supporting a major transition from monolithic systems to modern microservices architecture.
- Lead or Principal level influence; coach engineers across multiple teams and influence stakeholders.
Qualifications:
- Proven experience designing and implementing end‑to‑end test strategies for microservices environments.
- Hands‑on automation using Java, Selenium and Rest Assured across unit, integration, contract, system and end‑to‑end test levels.
- API testing, contract testing and asynchronous messaging including Kafka.
- CI/CD pipelines and Spring Boot‑based application environments.
- Contract testing tools such as Pactflow or Spring Cloud Contract.
- Performance testing using tools such as Gatling or K6.
- Cloud environments, specifically AWS.
- Non‑relational databases including MongoDB.
- Experience with Serenity BDD, Playwright, Docker, GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins and observability tools such as Grafana, Prometheus or Splunk is highly desirable.
- Ability to hold or pass SC clearance.
Pay to £640 per day (Inside IR35). Contract: Initial 12‑month.
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