Lead IEC Test Engineer

Job Description Summary
We're looking for a Lead IEC 61850 Test Engineer to help drive the testing, validation, and continuous improvement of our communication and substation automation solutions.

This is a great opportunity for someone with a strong foundation in IEC 61850, utility communication protocols, or software/systems testing, who is looking to grow into a role with real technical ownership and industry influence. You'll lead the development and execution of test strategies for IED communications and telecoms systems, integrating AI-driven test automation and predictive analytics to enhance regression efficiency, accelerate defect identification, and ensure the highest standards of reliability in complex IEC 61850 environments.

You will work alongside developers, stakeholders, and customers to ensure our solutions are reliable, compliant, and built to the highest standard.

We know great candidates come from a variety of backgrounds — if you have strong testing fundamentals and are excited to build deeper expertise in IEC 61850 and substation automation, we'd love to hear from you, even if you don't check every box below.

What You'll Be Doing

• Develop and maintain test plans, test cases, and test reports aligned with product and customer requirements

• Plan and execute new feature, regression, manual, and AI automated testing for software and communication systems

• Validate software and system behavior against specifications and compliance requirements

• Identify using AI-powered anomaly detection, investigate, and track defects and inconsistencies using standard bug tracking tools

• Collaborate closely with developers to troubleshoot issues and improve overall product quality

• Build and maintain automated test scripts using AI-assisted coding tools like Git Hub and Copilot to speed up the development of test scripts, contributing to the evolution of our regression test suites

• Set up and maintain testing tools and environments

• Review logs and test outputs to spot issues and recommend improvements using Natural Language Processing (NLP) or pattern recognition to aggregate thousands of log lines into actionable summaries, significantly reducing the time spent on root-cause analysis

• Help keep test tracking and reporting accurate and current

• Support testing of telecoms systems — a valuable part of the role we can help you grow into if it's new to you

• Liaise with customers, certification bodies, and standards organizations on validation and compliance activities

• Represent the business at relevant industry and standards forums, where opportunities arise

• Contribute ideas to improve our testing standards and processes

What We're Looking For

We're flexible on exact background — what matters most is strong testing experience and a genuine interest in communication systems and substation automation. Ideally you'll bring some combination of the following:

• A degree in Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Computer Engineering, Power Systems, or a related field — or equivalent hands-on experience

• Familiarity with SCADA and communication protocols

• Some exposure to power system protection and/or IEC 61850 (deep expertise not required from day one — we support continued learning)

• A general understanding of networking concepts, such as TCP/IP

• Basic familiarity with XML

• Experience in client/server environments

• Any exposure to multi-user, stress, or load testing is a plus, but not essential

• A solid grounding in software or communications testing, with good analytical and debugging instincts

• Comfort writing test scripts and applying structured testing approaches

• Experience with test automation tools, or a strong interest in developing these skills

Don't have direct IEC 61850 experience? If you have strong testing…