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.

Methods is driven by a desire to improve public services for the benefit of all the people who use them, leveraging current technologies to deliver user centred solutions and having an internal culture that allows our staff to express themselves and be innovative. 

Requirements

As a QA Engineer you will be expected to work at one of our clients and perform high quality functional and non-functional testing on complex systems. You must be familiar with Agile practices and tools and able to work in fast paced CI/CD environment. You will be proactive and always look for ways to improve the automated tests to make them more efficient.  

You can work closely with developers, devops engineers and business stakeholders (operations, incident management and product management) to understand the positive and negative impact software can have on end users and provide accurate updates on the progress and outcomes of testing. 

Responsibilities: 

• Perform functional and non-functional (performance, accessibility, security, operational/user acceptance) testing, working within an Agile team. 

• Develop and maintain test automation solutions and scripts, promoting best practices within the development team 

• Develop and maintain performance/load/stress testing solutions using standard or open-source tools 

• Resolve problems and blockers as they occur and help to unlock the progress of testing 

• Collaborate, communicate & work effectively with geographically distributed cross-functional teams 

• Defect Management, ensuring that defects are effectively triaged and managed until resolution 

• Promote the value of solid testing practices to all delivery stakeholders and influence adoption of best practice 

Key Requirements: 

• Experience with devising TDD/BDD or Acceptance Test Driven Development strategies using a range of tools/frameworks, ensuring test coverage and execution is in line with the project, programme or portfolio Test Strategy and Business Risk Objectives.  

• Strong Java coding experience and knowledge of automated test frameworks e.g. Serenity, RestAssured 

• Strong experience using API testing tools, ideally Postman 
• Strong experience with Selenium, C# specFlow, BDD framework 

• Experience with integrating testing as part of the Secure-SDLC and CI/CD tooling in an DevSecOps environment using: GitHub, Jenkins, GitLab SaaS, Artifactory, Nexus etc.  

• Experience with testing citizen facing services 

• Experience with testing highly scalable, distributed, cloud native (PaaS/FaaS) and microservice orientated architecture applications leveraging containerisation, container orchestration, service mesh, messaging, proxies, API, persistent and ephemeral storage etc.  

• Experience using formal Test Management tools (Jira/Confluence, ALM).  

• Good awareness of Application Lifecycle Management and IT Service Management using tools such as Splunk, Grafana and ServiceNow. 

• Must be eligible for SC Clearance 

Desirable Skills & Experience: 

• Experience of using JavaScript Automation Frameworks such as WebdriverIO, Playwright 

• Experience of running stress/load testing using K6 and Grafana or other/similar open-source tools. 

• Knowledge of Microsoft Azure Portal 

• ISEB Certification in Software Testing 

Desirable Requirements: 

• Experience with data migration projects 

• Experience working in the Public Sector 

Benefits

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)