Senior Automation Tester - Urgent - Outside of IR35 at Cloud Consulting, Birmingham/Remote, 6 Months, £425 per day

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior System Tester to play a key role in assuring the quality, reliability, and performance of complex, mission-critical systems within a major UK Government digital transformation programme.

You will lead testing strategy, champion automation-first practices, and work closely with multidisciplinary delivery teams to embed a strong culture of quality and continuous improvement. This role requires deep technical expertise in modern test automation frameworks, Back End validation, service-based architectures, and performance testing.

The role is a hybrid one - 2 days p/week on-site in Birmingham, and 3 days remote.

Must have Active SC & NPPV3 clearance

Key Responsibilities

• 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 microservice and distributed architectures
• Perform advanced Back End validation and data integrity checks using PostgreSQL
• Design and maintain service mocks and stubs using WireMock
• Collaborate with teams building Spring-based applications to ensure testability and quality gates
• Lead performance and load testing using JMeter and provide optimisation recommendations
• Manage defects, risks, and issues, ensuring clear communication and timely resolution
• Facilitate workshops, quality reviews, and technical discussions with stakeholders
• Mentor junior testers and promote best practices in automation and CI/CD integration
• Drive continuous improvement of testing processes, tools, and delivery workflows

Essential Skills & Experience

• Extensive hands-on experience with JUnit, Cucumber, and Selenium WebDriver
• Strong understanding of Spring applications, microservices, and distributed systems
• Advanced proficiency in PostgreSQL (query optimisation, data validation)
• Experience using WireMock for service virtualisation
• Strong expertise with JMeter for performance, load, and stress testing
• Proven experience leading testing within Agile delivery teams
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Experience with Git, Jira, Confluence and similar tools
• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills

Desirable Skills

• Contract testing and microservices testing at scale
• Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• BDD/TDD and quality-driven engineering practices
• Monitoring and observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK)
• Experience in consultancy or government digital delivery environments