Quality Assurance - Consultant

Ready to keep quality at the heart of projects with impact?

Do you want to make a real impact by building quality into services from the very start? Are you an experienced Test engineer who can quickly understand a client environment, build strong relationships and help teams deliver with confidence?

We’re a growing tech consultancy creating user-centred solutions with purpose for our clients in the public sector. As a Quality Assurance Consultant, you’ll bring strong testing expertise and a consultancy mindset, joining multidisciplinary client teams and making an impact from day one. You’ll champion our automation-first, shift-left approach to quality, building automated testing into delivery from the outset and embedding quality throughout the lifecycle. You’ll identify risks early, provide rapid feedback, prevent defects and continuously improve quality. You’ll be confident questioning assumptions, influencing technical and quality decisions, and adapting quickly to different technologies, teams and client environments.

The role

You'll work on public and private sector projects. You may be the sole software quality engineer on a project or work in a team.

Leading by example and promoting the Opencast approach, you'll work in an agile environment across all testing types. You'll collaborate with team members, clients and users to maintain quality and follow best practice. You'll adapt to different tools and technologies, advising on the best and mentoring junior colleagues.

You'll ensure that work is carried out in accordance with Opencast's quality, environmental, and information security policies and procedures, as well as applicable customer policies, standards, and procedures while working on client.

Requirements

We’re looking for people with experience delivering digital services within the public sector, with an understanding of GDS standards and ways of working.

You’ll need strong test automation experience, including hands-on involvement in building, developing or maintaining automation frameworks. You should be comfortable contributing to automation strategy and embedding effective testing practices throughout the delivery lifecycle.

This role involves weekly on-site work, and you’ll be required to travel regularly to client locations across the UK. We’re looking for people who value in-person collaboration, enjoy building strong relationships, and are passionate about delivering solutions that make a real difference for our clients.

Due to the nature of this role, you must either hold active Security Check (SC) clearance or be eligible and willing to undergo the clearance process.

SC clearance is granted in line with UK Government security vetting requirements. Typically, applicants must have UK citizenship and have lived continuously in the UK for at least the past five years, with no single absence exceeding 28 consecutive days. Nationality and immigration status may also be considered as part of the vetting process. We are unable to progress applications from candidates who do not meet these requirements.

If you are unsure whether you meet the eligibility criteria, we encourage you to review the guidance or discuss this with us before applying.

We are recruiting for multiple positions, with opportunities available immediately and in the coming months. If you are interested in joining Opencast, we encourage you to apply.

Technical Skills

To succeed in this role, you must have experience working as the sole software test engineer on a team and be confident taking ownership of test automation.

In your CV and at interview, you’ll need to show experience of:

• Building, developing and maintaining test automation frameworks, not just writing or executing automated tests within an existing framework.
• Developing and running front-end and API test automation, using tools and frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, Cucumber BDD or JUnit.
• Writing, maintaining and debugging automated tests across applications and services, using technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Scala, TypeScript or JavaScript.
• Driving automation within a multidisciplinary team, identifying what should be automated and helping to embed automation throughout the development lifecycle.
• Presenting work to stakeholders.
• Managing defects and tasks through to resolution.
• Creating user stories and technical tasks from high-level requirements.
• Using version control tools such as Git and working with peer review processes.
• Creating test plans and reports.
• Participating in end-to-end (E2E) testing and user acceptance testing (UAT).

You'll need a good understanding of:

• Your working area and applying this to your role
• Concepts and benefits of non-functional testing
• Continuous integration tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI or CircleCI
• Basic principles of programming paradigms, such as object-orientated and procedural programming

Essential Skills

As well as QA skills, there are essential core skills you’ll need to be a great consultant.

In the interview, we will assess how you have:

• Organised your workload to ensure you're completing tasks efficiently to ensure quality is unaffected
• Strong attention to detail
• A methodical approach to resolving complex problems
• Respectfully challenged decisions or solutions
• Bring recent government (public sector) experience .
• Deliver complex digital services aligned to Government Digital Service (GDS) standards.
• Communicated with technical and non-technical people
• Been proactive and taken the initiative in seeking solutions to mitigate risk
• Raised risks and issues through the correct tools

Other experience

Some areas of experience are not essential but relevant to the role:

• Agile methodology

Salary

£48,000 - £54,000

What we offer

A competitive package including a 7% employer pension contribution, share options and a discretionary bonus. You’ll also benefit from flexible working hours (aligned to client commitments), 25 days’ holiday, and access to 3 annual “life happens” days to support unexpected situations. We also offer wellbeing support, ongoing professional development, volunteering opportunities and the chance to be part of a genuinely supportive team.

Where you’ll work

This role requires regular on-site attendance across our HQ, hub offices, client sites and home. Applicants must be able to commute to offices and client sites as part of their normal working arrangements, as travel is essential to fulfilling the responsibilities of the role.

We include you

We welcome candidates from all identities, attributes, ways of thinking and backgrounds to thrive in a career at Opencast. Our aim is for the diversity of our people to be reflected in the solutions we deliver, to help create a fairer society for all.

Interview

Interviews will be conducted via Microsoft Teams. We’re happy to make adjustments to support your needs.

Want to know more?

Visit our website or email careers@opencastsoftware.com