Lead Test Engineer

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 Mongo
  
  DB.
• Experience with Serenity BDD, Playwright, Docker, Git Hub, Git Lab, 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.