Senior Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) in London

WE ARE: At Adaptive, we are a financial consulting firm that partners with capital, commodity, and digital market participants. We value differentiation through technology. Our experienced teams design and deliver complex front-office technology solutions using our proven accelerators to create long-term competitive advantage. Our clients include the world's leading investment banks, investment managers, fintech and capital market service providers. With a global reach with offices in London, New York, Barcelona and Montreal, we have a proven track record of delivering powerful, elegant and intuitive trading technology solutions.

YOU ARE:

• Self-directed, with the ability to define and manage priorities independently
• A great team player who loves sharing knowledge and learning from others
• A problem solver with strong analytical skills
• Excited about learning new things and keeping up to date
• Happy to work in a test-driven and Agile development fashion

YOU HAVE:

• Strong understanding of QA methodologies, shift-left practices, and the full software development lifecycle (TDD, BDD, Scrum, Kanban)
• Proficient in Java, with a focus on automated testing, root cause analysis, and debugging
• Comfortable implementing tests across the full test stack: unit, component, integration, system, and E2E
• Experience in uncovering complex edge cases through exploratory testing
• Confident in translating feature specifications into appropriate test coverage and test plans
• Working knowledge of BDD practices, including story refinement, example mapping, acceptance criteria definition, and 3 Amigos
• Comfortable using existing code and tests to understand system behaviour
• Practical knowledge of application profiling to identify performance and memory bottlenecks
• Familiar with defining quality metrics, telemetry, and reporting dashboards
• Hands-on exposure to chaos testing to validate system fault tolerance and reliability
• Experienced in integrating test runs and static code analysis tools into CI/CD pipelines
• Working knowledge of maintaining CI/CD pipeline health, with a focus on minimising false positives and maintaining reliable feedback
• Background in building containerised test environments with Docker and Kubernetes
• Practical familiarity with observability and monitoring platforms
• Understanding of performance and load testing for distributed pub/sub low-latency messaging technologies
• Knowledge of AI tooling applications within QA workflows to improve coverage, efficiency and defect detection
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, Azure, and OpenShift
• Financial services or trading domain experience is a nice to have
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with confidence engaging internal and external stakeholders

YOU WILL:

• Propose and enhance project's test plans with focus on test automation approach
• Work on technically challenging quality engineering problems across code, tests, and CI/CD pipelines
• Confidently leverage your experience in questioning and challenging existing practices while actively promoting QA best practices.
• Encourage a mindset/culture by educating your team that quality is everyone's responsibility and focusing your time on value-add testing tasks, rather than routine checks.
• Design, maintain and execute test cases and provide your analysis on the results
• Build a solid understanding on business, technical and operational requirements
• Follow and suggest improvements to the quality assurance process
• Collaborate with other QAs, BAs and DEV team to enhance automated tests and get maximum test coverage
• Work with Dev and DevOps team to improve our test automation tools and solutions

WHY US: To be immersed in high-standard engineering culture. Our fantastic team takes pride in crafting complex technical solutions but also loves sharing their knowledge and helping you grow professionally. You can learn from anyone here, which is the beauty of it. To take part in the growth and development of a great company. Our teams feel free to speak up, make suggestions and raise concerns. Collaborative team environment: we all work together, respect each other, and pitch in. Great consideration for work/life balance (highly-flexible, hybrid working model, well-being benefits...). The balance between professional and personal life is massively important to us. We work hard to provide a positive, collaborative and inclusive culture and to positively impact our staff and local communities through different well-being, diversity and inclusion programmes.

BENEFITS (What we offer in return): We create benefits with YOU in mind. Permanent employees: 25 days holiday, Pension scheme, Family medical and dental, Life insurance and Long-term disability cover, Cycle scheme, Season ticket loan, Gym subsidy, Employee Assistance Programme, Mental Health First Aiders.

THE PROCESS: Long interview processes are stressful and boring, and that is not us. We want to make sure that everything runs smoothly. So here you will have three-stage interviews:

• A chat with one of our great recruiters.
• A zoom chat with one of our QA colleagues where they will ask you detailed questions about QA knowledge and your experience.
• A Face to Face interview (either in our office or via Zoom). During this interview, we will dig even deeper, and you will have a technical task to do. But don't worry; everything will be explained to you step by step by your recruiter.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION: Diversity and inclusion are key to a great workplace, and Adaptive is better when it's more representative of the world around us. We want everyone to feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to work without any fear of judgment or negativity. All we ask is that our colleagues are respectful, collaborative, passionate about what they do, and have the skills needed to be successful in their roles.