Software Test Engineer

Job Title: Software Test Engineer Location: Rugeley, Staffordshire Term: 12 Months IR35: INSIDE Hourly Rate: £DOE I am seeking an experienced Software Test Engineer to join a multi-disciplinary engineering team delivering safety- and mission-critical software. This is a hands-on testing role for someone who is comfortable working at code level as well as system level. You will work closely with Software Engineers, Systems Engineers and Quality teams, taking ownership of unit, integration and regression testing across Windows and Linux environments. You will play a key role in strengthening automated testing, maintaining CI pipelines and ensuring robust, traceable test evidence from requirements through to results. Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, review and maintain unit tests for new and legacy software.
• Develop and maintain automated integration and regression test suites across Windows and Linux.
• Derive test cases from requirements and maintain requirements-to-test traceability.
• Manage test workflows and artefacts within Jira and Confluence.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, including Bitbucket Pipelines, Bamboo or Jenkins.
• Investigate, reproduce and document software defects, working closely with developers through to resolution.
• Produce test plans, specifications, reports and evidence packs for internal and customer review.
• Monitor code coverage, test pass rates and defect trends, identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Support code reviews from a testing and quality perspective.
• Coach developers on effective unit testing and contribute to improvements in testing strategy, tooling and processes.
• Work in accordance with configuration management, information security and quality procedures. Essential Skills & Experience
• Unit testing and test-driven development (TDD).
• Testing frameworks such as Google Test, Catch2, CppUnit, NUnit, xUnit, MSTest, JUnit or pytest.
• Reading, writing and debugging code in C++, C#, Java or Python.
• Mocking and test-double frameworks such as Google Mock, Moq, Mockito or unittest.mock.
• Code coverage and static analysis tools such as gcov/lcov, OpenCover, SonarQube, Coverity or Polyspace.
• Designing test cases from written requirements and maintaining test traceability.
• Defect management, including reproduction, severity assessment, evidence capture and closure verification. Atlassian & CI/CD
• Jira – boards, workflows, issue types, filters and dashboards.
• Jira test management tools such as Xray or Zephyr Scale.
• Confluence – producing structured technical and testing documentation.
• Bitbucket – source control, branching, pull requests and code reviews.
• Bamboo and/or Bitbucket Pipelines – configuring and troubleshooting automated build and test stages. Platforms & Development Tooling
• Windows and Linux environments.
• PowerShell, Bash and/or Python scripting.
• CMake, MSBuild, make, GCC/Clang and MSVC.
• Git, including branching, merging, rebasing and conflict resolution.
• Virtual machines and containers.
• Automated test environments and supporting infrastructure.
• PLEASE NOTE* Security Clearance (SC) or eligibility to gain is required to be considered for this vacancy