ESCO Maritime
Software Tester (Unit Test/AtlassianToolchain) - Contractor
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Job Description: Software Tester
We are seeking an experienced Software Tester to join a multi-disciplinary engineering team delivering safety- and mission-critical software for the maritime defence sector. You will be embedded with the various development teams, working at the code level as well as the system level, and taking ownership of the unit and integration test estate across both Windows and Linux targets.
This is a first hand role for a tester who is comfortable in the codebase. As well as designing and executing tests, you will strengthen the test tooling, keep automated test execution running reliably in the CI pipeline, and ensure that test evidence is traceable from requirement through to result within the Atlassian toolchain.
The successful candidate will work on site at our Rugeley, Staffordshire facility, alongside software engineers, systems engineers, and quality assurance colleagues.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, write, review, and maintain unit tests for new and legacy code, working to agreed coverage and quality targets.
- Develop and maintain integration and regression test suites that execute automatically on both Windows and Linux build agents.
- Analyse requirements and design documentation to derive test cases and maintain bidirectional traceability from requirement to test case to result.
- Own the test management workflow in Jira — including test issue types, workflows, boards, and reporting — and keep test artefacts current in Confluence.
- Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (Bitbucket Pipelines, Bamboo or Jenkins), diagnose pipeline failures, and keep the build green.
- Investigate, reproduce, and clearly document defects; triage them with developers and track them to closure.
- Produce test plans, test specifications, test reports, and evidence packs suitable for internal review and customer acceptance.
- Measure and report on code coverage, test pass rates, and defect trends, and recommend improvements where quality risk is emerging.
- Support code reviews with a testability and quality perspective and coach developers on effective unit testing practice.
- Contribute to continuous improvement of test strategy, tooling, and process across the programme.
- Work within the organisation’s configuration management, information security, and quality management procedures always.
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Essential Skills And Experience
Testing
- Demonstrable commercial experience as a software tester, test engineer, or SDET on a software development team.
- Strong practical experience of unit testing and test-driven development, using frameworks such as Google Test, Catch2, CppUnit, NUnit, xUnit, MSTest, JUnit or pytest.
- Ability to read, write and debug code in at least one of C++, C#, Java, or Python to write meaningful tests and reproduce defects.
- Experience with mocking and test-double frameworks (for example Google Mock, Moq, Mockito, unittest.mock).
- Working knowledge of code coverage and static analysis tooling (for example gcov/lcov, OpenCover, SonarQube, Coverity, Polyspace).
- Experience designing test cases from written requirements and maintaining requirements-to-test traceability.
- Sound defect management practice — clear reproduction steps, severity assessment, evidence capture and closure verification.
Atlassian suite
- Firsthand experience with Jira, including creating and configuring boards, workflows, issue types, filters, and dashboards.
- Experience with a Jira test management application such as Xray, Zephyr Scale or TestRail integration.
- Confluence authoring — test plans, test specifications, procedures, and structured technical documentation.
- Bitbucket for source control, branching strategy, pull requests and code review.
- Experience configuring and troubleshooting automated builds and test stages in Bamboo, Bitbucket Pipelines.
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Platforms and tooling
- Confident working across both Windows and Linux — command line, scripting, filesystem, permissions, and services on each.
- Scripting for test automation and environment setup (PowerShell, Bash, and/or Python).
- Familiarity with cross-platform build systems and toolchains (CMake, MSBuild, make, GCC/Clang, MSVC).
- Comfortable setting up and maintaining test environments, including virtual machines and containers.
- Git fluency — branching, merging, rebasing, and resolving conflicts.
Desirable Skills
- Prior experience in defence, maritime, aerospace, nuclear, rail or another safety- or security-critical regulated domain.
- Awareness of relevant standards and practice such as DO-178C, IEC 61508, MISRA C/C++, or Def Stan 00-055/00-056.
- ISTQB Foundation (or higher) certification, or equivalent formal test qualification.
- Experience testing embedded, real-time, sensor or signal-processing software.
- Experience of hardware-in-the-loop or rig-based testing, and of testing against simulated data sets.
- Exposure to test automation at system level (for example Robot Framework, Squish, Selenium, or bespoke harnesses).
- Experience of formal verification and validation activities and customer witness testing.
- Familiarity with Atlassian administration, including permission schemes and app configuration.
Note: All candidates must meet the security vetting requirements relevant to the role. For reasons of national security, applicants must be British nationals. Dual nationals may be permitted in exceptional circumstances.
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