Senior Software Tester - Contract in Bristol

SRT Marine Systems plc (SRT) is a market leader in the domain of international marine surveillance technology and systems. We are a respected, established, and ambitious multi-national company headquartered in the UK with a global customer base. The company has a worldwide impact in the marine sector by leading the next generation of Maritime Domain Awareness technologies (MDA), products, and systems that significantly enhance security, safety, environmental protection, and sustainability. Our customers range from the largest national coast guards to individual vessel owners.

SRT is an exciting company where high-quality results are rewarded. We are ambitious and constantly seek to innovate in order to deliver better products and services to our customers. We strive to make SRT a rewarding and challenging place to work, where talented, hard-working individuals have the opportunity to make a real impact across the marine industry.

As a Senior Software Tester, you will work on the continued build of our Marine Domain Awareness (MDA) platform which is used to create an operational picture of maritime activity. Our system ingests large volumes of streaming data including satellite and terrestrial, along with other sensor sources. These data streams are processed through an event-driven architecture, where messages are ingested via RabbitMQ queues and handled by a suite of approximately 50 distributed services. In addition to asynchronous message processing, our services expose CRUD APIs used to manage and query maritime entities and system state.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Software Tester who can help ensure the reliability, correctness, and performance of this complex system. The role is a hybrid working position based from our Cardiff office, requiring attendance in the office 1 day per week as per the team's requirements.

How We Work

• Sprint Work: Development tickets move across the Jira board through the delivery workflow. Tickets reaching the Test stage are assigned to a tester. Testers validate functionality using a mix of automated and manual testing approaches.
• QA Release Cycles: Every six weeks, we conduct a dedicated two-week QA phase where testers pause normal sprint board work. The focus shifts to release-wide regression testing. Both manual and automated test suites are executed to validate the full platform.

Responsibilities (not exhaustive):

• Test new features and improvements delivered during sprint cycles.
• Design, implement, and maintain automated tests where appropriate.
• Validate message-driven workflows across distributed services.
• Test REST API endpoints supporting CRUD operations within the system.
• Participate in release regression cycles and help validate production-ready builds.
• Investigate issues, reproduce defects, and provide clear bug reports.
• Work closely with developers and product teams to clarify requirements and ensure testability.
• Become comfortable operating within the platform's technical environment, including investigating minor non-prod environment config issues and understanding data flows across services.

Required Skills and Experience:

• Strong experience as a software tester or QA engineer.
• Experience testing complex distributed systems or backend platforms.
• Familiarity with tools such as Postman (or similar API testing tools).
• Ability to understand system behaviour through logs, messages, and APIs.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
• Experience working within Agile / Scrum teams.
• Familiarity with Jira or similar issue-tracking tools.

SRT Marine Systems plc are an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an inclusive working environment for all employees and actively encourage applications from all sectors of the community.