QA Automation Engineer​/Consultant

Methods is a £100M+ IT Services Consultancy who has partnered with a range of central government departments and agencies to transform the way the public sector operates in the UK. Established over 30 years ago and UK-based, we apply our skills in transformation, delivery, and collaboration from across the Methods Group, to create end-to-end business and technical solutions that are people-centred, safe, and designed for the future.

Our human touch sets us apart from other consultancies, system integrators and software houses - with people, technology, and data at the heart of who we are, we believe in creating value and sustainability through everything we do for our clients, staff, communities, and the planet.

We support our clients in the success of their projects while working collaboratively to share skill sets and solve problems. At Methods we have fun while working hard; we are not afraid of making mistakes and learning from them.

Predominantly focused on the public-sector, Methods is now building a significant private sector client portfolio.

Methods was acquired by the Alten Group in early 2022. Alten is a global engineering firm with approximately 57,000 employees specializing in engineering and IT services.

As a QA Automation Engineer, you will work within a multidisciplinary team to build quality into complex digital services.

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on designing, developing and maintaining automated tests using Java. You will test APIs, user journeys and integrations across distributed services, providing reliable feedback throughout development and clear evidence to support release decisions.

You will work closely with developers, Dev Ops engineers, business analysts, product owners and operational teams to understand requirements, identify risks and verify that business processes complete correctly. You will take ownership of automation quality, investigate failures and continually improve the reliability, coverage and maintainability of the test suites.

• Design, develop and maintain automated API, integration and end-to-end tests using Java, Serenity BDD, Cucumber, Selenium Web Driver and REST Assured.
• Contribute to reusable test components and maintainable automation frameworks, applying sound coding practices and participating in code reviews.
• Work with developers, business analysts and product owners to define testable acceptance criteria and appropriate positive, negative and boundary scenarios.
• Select the appropriate level of testing for each risk, balancing coverage, execution time and maintenance effort.
• Integrate and maintain automated tests within Azure Dev Ops CI/CD pipelines, providing timely and actionable feedback.
• Test asynchronous workflows and interactions between services, including event processing, messaging, retries and failure recovery.
• Verify completed business outcomes through APIs, database checks and user journeys, including downstream processing and data consistency.
• Create and maintain repeatable test data, accounting for environment dependencies, test isolation and parallel execution.
• Investigate failures using application logs, API responses, database queries and pipeline results, distinguishing application defects from automation, data and environment issues.
• Improve suite reliability by addressing flaky tests, unnecessary duplication and gaps in regression coverage.
• Turn production defects and recurring incidents into repeatable automated regression scenarios.
• Perform targeted exploratory testing and contribute to performance, accessibility, security and operational readiness testing alongside relevant specialists.
• Maintain test coverage, execution records and release evidence in Jira/Zephyr, ensuring results are traceable to the relevant change, environment and release.
• Raise clear, reproducible defects and work with the team to triage, resolve and verify them.
• Communicate testing progress, outcomes, residual risks and coverage limitations clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Strong hands-on Java programming skills, with experience writing, reviewing and maintaining automated test code.
• Practical experience with Serenity BDD, Cucumber/Gherkin, Selenium Web Driver and REST Assured, supported by frameworks such as JUnit and Assert
  
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• Strong understanding of HTTP, REST APIs, JSON, authentication, validation and error handling.
• Experience testing distributed or…