Senior Test Engineer - JAVA/JAVASCRIPT at Layer7, Manchester, 6 Months, £Contract Rate

Location Manchester - DWP office 1 day per week
Work Pattern Hybrid
Rate £450 per day
IR35 Status Inside IR35
Clearance BPSS required

Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior Test Engineer to support the delivery of high-quality digital services within a large-scale public sector environment. This role is suited to a strong automation-focused Test Engineer with hands-on experience using Java or JavaScript, a solid understanding of modern engineering practices, and the ability to work closely with developers, delivery teams and wider stakeholders to embed quality throughout the software development life cycle. You will be expected to contribute to automated test strategy, support shift-left testing practices, and help ensure services are reliable, secure, accessible and performant.

Key Responsibilities:

- Design, develop and maintain automated test frameworks and test suites.
- Work with engineering teams to embed testing earlier in the delivery life cycle.
- Support CI/CD pipelines through effective automated testing practices.
- Contribute to test planning, test estimation and test approach definition.
- Carry out and support functional, integration, regression and exploratory testing.
- Work closely with developers, business analysts, product owners and delivery managers.
- Champion quality engineering principles across Agile delivery teams.
- Support non-functional testing activity, including performance, security and accessibility considerations.
- Identify test risks, defects and quality issues, ensuring clear communication and appropriate escalation.
- Mentor or support other testers where required.

Essential Skills:

- Strong commercial experience as a Test Engineer/Senior Test Engineer.
- Previous experience working within DWP, Central Government or wider public sector environments.
- Hands-on automation testing experience.
- Strong coding or Scripting capability in Java and/or JavaScript.
- Experience building, maintaining or extending automated test frameworks.
- Good understanding of Agile delivery environments.
- Understanding of shift-left testing principles and how testing fits into CI/CD pipelines.
- Experience working closely with software engineering teams.
- Understanding of non-functional testing, including performance, security testing principles, and accessibility testing.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills.
- Ability to work independently and take ownership of testing activity.

Nice To Have:

- Experience with tools such as Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Cucumber, JUnit, Jest or similar.
- Experience testing APIs and microservices.
- Familiarity with cloud-hosted digital services.
- Awareness of GDS standards and accessibility requirements.