Software Engineer in Test

• Ideal start date Monday 1st September
• New platform build for blue-chip client Financial services client
• 6 months +
• Outside IR35
• £Competitive day rate
• 2 days in person working / week.
• We're looking for high proficiency in Automation testing and designing and building a full suite of platform tests.
• Immediate Interviews

Senior Software Engineer in Test (SET)

Location: London-based hybrid (Red Badger HQ, client sites and remote)

Engagement: Full-time, project-embedded consulting

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer in Test (SET) to join Red Badger’s high-performing engineering teams. In this role, you’ll define and drive quality strategy for platform and infrastructure-level products — from container orchestration and microservices to observability tooling and CI/CD pipelines.

This is a hands-on engineering position within cross-functional teams where quality is everyone’s responsibility but you’ll lead the way in making it systematic, scalable and secure. You’ll help shape testability at the architecture level, automate deep validation across environments, and play a key role in managing delivery risk across distributed systems.

Key Responsibilities

Own Platform Reliability and Integration Confidence

• Define and implement test strategies for complex, cloud-native platform components
• Build test frameworks and tooling that support integration testing, contract testing and system validation across multiple layers (infra, data, APIs, services)
• Drive shift-left testing practices and ensure testability is baked into architecture, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code
• Lead fault injection, resilience testing, performance benchmarking and production-readiness validation
• Collaborate with engineers, SREs and product leads to ensure the platform behaves reliably under real-world conditions

Be a Technical Leader in Quality Engineering

• Establish standards and practices for testing distributed, event-driven systems
• Enable observability-driven debugging by working closely with platform and service teams
• Automate validation of operational characteristics like availability, latency, throughput and recoverability
• Contribute to security posture through continuous validation of access controls, data protection and policy enforcement

What You Bring

• Proven experience in a quality or software engineering role focused on platforms, infrastructure or backend systems
• Deep understanding of system testing, failure modes and fault-tolerant design in distributed systems
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), Kubernetes, cloud-native platforms (AWS), service meshes, CI/CD (e.g. GitHub Actions) and observability tooling (e.g. OpenTelemetry, Grafana)
• Strong programming skills in a modern backend language (e.g. Kotlin, Java, Go, or Python) with a test automation mindset
• Familiarity with resilience patterns, chaos testing, synthetic traffic and platform health metrics
• A product mindset — you care about the user experience of developers, not just the green test bar

Why Red Badger

At Red Badger, we work on complex, business-critical digital platforms where quality isn’t negotiable. You’ll be surrounded by senior practitioners, embedded in empowered teams, and supported in driving meaningful, secure and resilient engineering outcomes.

We value thoughtful problem solving, clarity over complexity and doing things the right way — with strong defaults, open collaboration and clear purpose.

Diversity & Inclusion:

Red Badger is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment, and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We hire, employ, train, promote and compensate regardless of gender, gender identity, race, disability, sexual orientation, age, creed and colour. We are fully focused on equality, and it is our fundamental belief that the fascinating characteristics that make us all different enable us to continue to do amazing work for our clients.