Red Badger
Senior Software Engineer in Test (SET)
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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
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- 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
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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.
Hybrid working: We work in person 2/3 days a week from our London Office or client office (London-based)
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