Automation Test Engineer

Senior Test Automation Engineer – SC Cleared
Remote – £600 PD Inside IR 35 – 6 moths

A leading public sector organisation is seeking an experienced Senior Test Automation Engineer to play a key role in the delivery of a large-scale digital transformation programme. The chosen candidate must have experience in Playwright or Cypress, Kotlin and TypeScript with API testing.
This is an opportunity to work within a complex enterprise environment, helping to ensure the quality, resilience, and performance of critical services that support thousands of users across the UK.

Working within a multidisciplinary Agile team, you will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining automated testing frameworks across UI, API, and end-to-end testing layers. You will work closely with developers, business analysts, and operational stakeholders to ensure robust testing coverage across multiple interconnected systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement automated test frameworks for UI, API, integration, and end-to-end testing.
• Develop and maintain automated tests using Playwright and/or Cypress.
• Test services built using Kotlin and TypeScript technologies.
• Validate complex integrations between modern platforms and legacy systems.
• Deliver API testing across multiple services and enterprise applications.
• Perform resilience and failure testing, including timeout, degradation, and dependency failure scenarios.
• Implement and maintain contract testing frameworks using tools such as PACT.
• Verify cross-system data propagation and state changes across integrated platforms.
• Create and maintain smoke, regression, and core user journey test suites covering both happy and unhappy paths.
• Test data flows, imports, exports, synchronisation processes, and data integrity controls.
• Support feature-flagged releases and validate behaviour across multiple feature configurations.
• Execute performance and load testing activities using tools such as Gatling.
• Support and coordinate User Acceptance Testing (UAT) activities with operational stakeholders.
• Contribute to continuous improvement of testing standards, processes, and automation capabilities.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong experience designing and implementing enterprise-scale automated testing frameworks.
• Hands-on expertise with Playwright and/or Cypress.
• Proven experience testing applications and services developed in Kotlin and TypeScript.
• Strong API testing experience within complex distributed environments.
• Experience testing integrations between multiple systems and services.
• Knowledge of resilience testing, fault injection, timeout handling, and service degradation scenarios.
• Experience with contract testing tools such as PACT.
• Strong understanding of test automation best practices and CI/CD integration.
• Experience validating data integrity across complex data flows and synchronisation processes.
• Knowledge of PostgreSQL, SQL, and database-driven testing approaches.
• Ability to test edge cases, exception handling, and operational failure modes.
• Experience supporting large-scale UAT programmes.
• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

Desirable Experience

• Experience with data migration testing, including mapping, transformation, and validation.
• Exposure to criminal justice, government, or highly regulated environments.
• Experience with performance and load testing tools such as Gatling.
• Knowledge of large-scale distributed architectures and microservices environments.

What’s on Offer?

• Opportunity to work on a high-profile national transformation programme.
• Complex enterprise-scale technology environment.
• Collaborative Agile delivery teams.
• Long-term contract potential.

If you are an experienced Test Automation Engineer with a passion for quality engineering, automation, and delivering resilient enterprise solutions, we’d love to hear from you.