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Senior QA / SDET | Java, Spring Boot & API Testing | London Hybrid | £60,000 + Bonus
I’m working with a specialist financial-services business looking to hire a backend-focused Senior QA Engineer / SDET to help drive quality across complex, business-critical trading systems.
This is not a UI-heavy automation role.
They are looking for someone who thinks like a developer and has strong experience testing backend services, APIs, microservices, databases and event-driven systems. You’ll take ownership of test strategy, build robust automation frameworks and help ensure reliability across highly integrated financial platforms.
You’ll be joining a technical environment where accuracy, data integrity and production stability are essential.
What you’ll be doing
- Driving the QA and automation strategy across backend trading and financial-services systems
- Building and maintaining automated API and service-level test frameworks using Java
- Testing Spring Boot applications, microservices and complex business logic
- Developing integration tests across APIs, databases, messaging systems and downstream services
- Mocking and stubbing external dependencies using tools such as WireMock, Mockito or MockServer
- Building deterministic test environments using TestContainers and Docker
- Validating asynchronous workflows, callbacks, retries, timeouts and failure scenarios
- Testing Kafka, RabbitMQ or other event-driven architectures
- Performing complex SQL validation, reconciliation and financial-data checks
- Implementing contract testing using Pact, Spring Cloud Contract or similar tools
- Embedding automated testing into CI/CD pipelines
- Supporting reliable releases across a regulated, business-critical environment
- Using Playwright or Selenium selectively for critical user journeys and smoke testing
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What they’re looking for
- Strong commercial experience as a QA Engineer, Automation Engineer or SDET
- A backend-focused testing background rather than predominantly UI automation
- Strong Java experience
- Good working knowledge of Spring Boot
- Strong experience with JUnit or TestNG
- Deep hands-on experience with REST Assured
- Strong API, service-level and integration-testing experience
- Experience using Mockito, WireMock or MockServer
- Experience with Spring Boot Test, including @SpringBootTest or @WebMvcTest
- Hands-on experience with TestContainers
- Strong SQL skills, including complex queries, joins and data validation
- Experience testing microservices and multi-system workflows
- Experience testing authentication flows such as OAuth2 and JWT
- Strong understanding of JSON schema validation
- Experience integrating automated tests into Jenkins, GitHub Actions or GitLab CI
- Docker experience and a basic understanding of Kubernetes
- Genuine practical experience with TDD, BDD, shift-left testing and the test pyramid
Highly desirable
- Experience testing Kafka, RabbitMQ or other messaging systems
- Event, producer and consumer validation
- Avro or JSON schema validation
- Contract testing using Pact or Spring Cloud Contract
- Karate or Spring MockMvc
- gRPC or GraphQL testing
- Kotlin or Groovy
- Playwright or Selenium for limited UI coverage
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Domain experience
Experience within one or more of the following would be highly valuable:
- Trading systems or exchanges
- Risk platforms, including VaR, PnL or reporting systems
- Payments, banking or fintech
- Other complex regulated financial-services environments
What success looks like
You should be able to confidently explain how you would:
- Test a service that depends on several downstream APIs
- Mock services and simulate failures, delays and outages
- Test a payment or trading flow across multiple systems
- Validate APIs, databases and messaging together
- Test retries, timeouts, fallbacks and asynchronous processes
- Reconcile complex financial data using SQL
- Build stable, maintainable test frameworks rather than relying on manual Postman testing
Offer
- £60,000 base salary
- Discretionary bonus
- Hybrid working - 3 days per week in the London office
- 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
- Private healthcare with Vitality
- Gym membership
This is a great fit for a backend-focused SDET who enjoys testing complex systems, writing production-quality automation code and working closely with developers to improve quality throughout the software development lifecycle.
📩 Apply to hear more.
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