QA Automation Engineer / Consultant

About Methods:

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.

About the role

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, DevOps 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.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain automated API, integration and end-to-end tests using Java, Serenity BDD, Cucumber, Selenium WebDriver 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 DevOps 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.

Essential skills and experience

• Strong hands-on Java programming skills, with experience writing, reviewing and maintaining automated test code.
• Practical experience with Serenity BDD, Cucumber/Gherkin, Selenium WebDriver and REST Assured, supported by frameworks such as JUnit and AssertJ.
• Strong understanding of HTTP, REST APIs, JSON, authentication, validation and error handling.
• Experience testing distributed or microservice-based applications, including asynchronous processing and messaging.
• Ability to verify complete business workflows across service boundaries, including data persistence and downstream outcomes.
• Confidence using SQL and application logs to prepare test data, investigate failures and validate results.
• Experience using Maven, Git, pull requests and automated build pipelines.
• Experience integrating and troubleshooting automated tests in Azure DevOps YAML pipelines or a comparable CI/CD platform.
• Understanding of test isolation, parallel execution, synchronisation and the causes of unreliable automated tests.
• Experience working in Agile teams, contributing to refinement, Three Amigos discussions and behaviour-driven development.
• Ability to prioritise testing according to business risk and apply an appropriate balance of component, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Experience managing defects, test execution and traceable evidence using Jira/Zephyr or equivalent tools.
• Clear communication, collaborative problem-solving and ownership of issues through to resolution.
• Eligibility to obtain SC clearance.

Desirable skills and experience

• Experience supporting complex public-sector digital services.
• Understanding of CQRS and event-sourced systems, including the distinction between command acceptance, event processing and query-side updates.
• Experience investigating message delivery, retries and dead-letter queues using technologies such as Apache ActiveMQ Artemis.
• Performance, load and stress testing using JMeter, k6 or similar tools.
• Experience using Splunk, Grafana or comparable observability tools.
• Experience testing applications hosted in Microsoft Azure and working with containerised environments, including Kubernetes.
• Browser automation using Playwright or WebdriverIO.
• Experience with accessibility testing, security testing or operational readiness testing.
• Experience testing data migrations, including reconciliation and data integrity checks.
• ISTQB/ISEB certification or equivalent practical experience.

This role will require you to have or be willing to go through Security Clearance. As part of the onboarding process candidates will be asked to complete a Baseline Personnel Security Standard; details of the evidence required to apply may be found on the government website Gov.UK. If you are unable to meet this and any associated criteria, then your employment may be delayed, or rejected. Details of this will be discussed with you at interview.

By joining us you can expect:

• Autonomy to develop and grow your skills and experience
• Be part of exciting project work that is making a difference in society
• Strong, inspiring and thought-provoking leadership
• A supportive and collaborative environment.

As well as this, we offer:

• Development access to LinkedIn Learning, a management development programme and training
• Wellness 24/7 Confidential employee assistance programme
• Social – Breakfast Tuesdays, Thirsty Thursdays and Pizza on the last Thursday of each month as well as commitment to charitable causes
• Time off 25 days a year
• Pension Salary Exchange Scheme with 4% employer contribution and 5% employee contribution
• Discretionary Company Bonus based on company and individual performance
• Life Assurance of 4 times base salary
• Private Medical Insurance which is non-contributory (spouse and dependants included)
• Worldwide Travel Insurance which is non-contributory (spouse and dependants included)