Senior Software Tester - Contract
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
As a Senior Software Tester you will work on the continued build of our Marine Domain Awareness (MDA) platform which is used to create an operational picture of maritime activity. Our system ingests large volumes of streaming data including satellite and terrestrial, along with other sensor sources. These data streams are processed through an event-driven architecture, where messages are ingested via RabbitMQ queues and handled by a suite of approximately 50 distributed services.
In addition to asynchronous message processing, our services expose CRUD APIs used to manage and query maritime entities and system state.
We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Tester who can help ensure the reliability, correctness, and performance of this complex system.
The role of Senior Software Tester role is a hybrid working position based from our Cardiff office, you will be required to attend office 1 day per week as per the team's requirements.
How We Work
- Sprint Work
- Development tickets move across the Jira board through the delivery workflow
- Tickets reaching the Test stage are assigned to a tester
- Testers validate functionality using a mix of automated and manual testing approaches
- QA Release Cycles
- Every six weeks, we conduct a dedicated two-week QA phase where: o Testers pause normal sprint board work o The focus shifts to release-wide regression testing o Both manual and automated test suites are executed to validate the full platform
Senior Software Tester - Responsibilities (not exhaustive):
- Test new features and improvements delivered during sprint cycles
- Design, implement, and maintain automated tests where appropriate
- Validate message-driven workflows across distributed services
- Test REST API endpoints supporting CRUD operations within the system
- Participate in release regression cycles and help validate production-ready builds
- Investigate issues, reproduce defects, and provide clear bug reports
- Work closely with developers and product teams to clarify requirements and ensure testability
- Become comfortable operating within the platform's technical environment, including:
- Investigating minor non-prod environment config issues
- Understanding data flows across services
Requirements
- Strong experience as a software tester or QA engineer
- Experience testing complex distributed systems or backend platforms
- Familiarity with tools such as Postman (or similar API testing tools)
- Ability to understand system behaviour through logs, messages, and APIs
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills
- Experience working within Agile / Scrum teams
- Familiarity with Jira or similar issue-tracking tools