QA Tester

Salary: £? - ? per year

Requirements:

• Hands-on Kafka experience, including topics, partitions, consumer groups, offsets, replay and schema registry.
• Experience testing high-volume ETL or ELT data pipelines at scale, with millions of rows per day or more.
• Experience writing a test strategy, including identifying what to test first, assessing risk in streaming data and sequencing evidence.
• Experience with modern architecture, including REST, contract testing and schema validation.
• Experience with automated regression testing in CI, with repeatable suites that run on every release.
• Comfort working closely with data engineers and building tooling that enables testing at the pipeline level.
• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Structured, evidence-led approach with defined criteria, traceability and thorough documentation.
• Ability to work in a small team with loose boundaries and high standards.
• SC clearance, or genuine eligibility for it; active clearance is strongly preferred on contract.

Responsibilities:

• Test large-scale Kafka streaming and batch data pipelines, including ingestion, transformation, reconciliation and output.
• Build test harnesses with data engineers to make the system testable at scale.
• Prove correctness, completeness and integrity across very large data volumes.
• Design and build an automated regression suite to run on every release and verify accuracy, stability and response times.
• Write the test strategy for the programme from scratch.
• Prepare formal test documentation for defence factory assurance, including what was tested, how, against which criteria and milestone sign-off.
• Work hands-on as part of a small, multidisciplinary team, including supporting engineering leadership.

Technologies:

• AI
• Cloud
• ETL
• Kafka
• Python
• REST
• SQL
• Security
• API
• IoT
• UX UI Design

More:

We are supporting a UK-headquartered AI company building sovereign AI capability for defence and national security. Our platform is an AI operating system built entirely in the UK for high-security, high-assurance environments, and it deploys across cloud, edge, on-premise and fully air-gapped systems. The business has been established for around a decade, recently closed a substantial Series A round and holds a significant government framework position. We are scaling engineering and delivery across the UK, and this role sits on a new twelve-person programme team from day one. The position is remote across the UK, with occasional travel to a client site if required, and the contract rate is around £550 per day, negotiable. Two contract seats are available on the programme.

last updated 37 week of 2026