Senior Test Engineer

£600 per day (Umbrella) | Inside IR35 | 6-Month Contract | Hybrid

Location: Birmingham, Kings Court, Sheffield Longbenton, Newcastle Manchester Corporate Hub, Peel Park, - Blackpool Quarry House - Leeds. 60% hybrid

We are currently recruiting for an experienced Senior Test Engineer to join a major public sector digital programme on an initial 6-month contract.

This is a senior technical leadership role, responsible for defining the overall testing strategy, providing technical direction to multiple Test Engineering teams, and ensuring high-quality delivery across a complex, high-volume data environment.

The Role

As Senior Test Engineer, you will provide strategic and technical leadership across testing activities, working closely with engineering teams, product teams and senior stakeholders.

You will be responsible for:

• Defining the strategic direction for Test Engineering across multiple product teams.
• Providing technical leadership, coaching and guidance to Test Engineering teams.
• Planning and overseeing system and acceptance testing.
• Defining test approaches, strategies and reporting mechanisms for senior stakeholders.
• Designing and delivering functional and non-functional testing.
• Acting as an escalation point for testing defects and technical issues.
• Defining test infrastructure requirements and identifying appropriate test tools.
• Improving test suite performance and reducing technical debt.
• Driving standardisation through reusable libraries, services and best practices.
• Working across teams to identify dependencies, impacts, priorities and delivery risks.
• Ensuring usability, accessibility, security, stability and capacity are considered throughout development.
• Sharing knowledge, mentoring colleagues and driving continuous improvement.

Essential Experience

• Strong hands-on Informatica PowerCenter experience.
• Strong Oracle experience.
• Proven experience planning and managing system and acceptance testing.
• Experience coordinating functional and non-functional testing requirements.
• Strong knowledge of test planning, strategy and best practice.
• Experience designing and executing a broad range of non-functional testing techniques.
• The ability to communicate testing outcomes effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience identifying, raising and prioritising defects according to severity and business impact.
• Strong investigative and analytical skills, with the ability to work through complex or conflicting information.
• Experience comparing delivery approaches, measuring outcomes and adapting when an approach is not working.
• Experience working within Agile or blended delivery environments.
• Experience helping teams visualise outcomes, prioritise work and deliver agreed MVPs.
• A strong understanding of testing tools, methodologies and the wider technical landscape.
• Experience coaching and mentoring Test Engineers.

Desirable Experience

• Experience working within government or large public sector organisations.
• AWS experience.
• Test automation experience.
• Strong SQL skills.
• Experience working with large-scale data environments and high-volume datasets.