Role: Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)
Location: UK Flexible

Role ID: 1749

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company, listed on the London Stock Exchange. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Energy & Environment, one of Ricardo plc’s five operating business units, is a leader in sustainability consultancy, solving complex environmental challenges through industry-leading analysis, advice and data. With more than 40 years of heritage in addressing air quality, environmental and sustainability issues, our customers value us for our deep understanding and breadth of services covering the entire value chain from evidence, policy & strategy to implementation.

We are currently looking for new additions to enhance our QA team and if you are a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) we'd like to talk to you.

The successful candidate will help us QA our data-intensive web applications for our public and private sector clients. Have solid PHP skills with a passion for test automation and scripting for some complex software solutions. Have a bank of examples where you've scripted automations and have demonstrable examples of where this has saved your team time and acted as the enabler to a more efficient software development cycle. 

Our preferred candidate will be comfortable working on a portfolio of projects, in teams and alone on smaller projects.  Our ideal candidate will relish testing challenging and complex software systems, have excellent organisational skills and be an enthusiastic contributor to our team. 

Duties and responsibilities

• Quality assurance of all development artefact's around new features developed or fixes within the software.
• Help embed automation frameworks and best practices.
• Test and prove that the software meets major architectural requirements.
• Code minor bug fixes and change requests arising.
• Prove for scalability and performance of a software.
• Ensuring the quality of systems as a whole.
• Work with software developers and product owners/managers in scrum teams.
• Develop and automate tests for software validation.
• Regression testing of existing systems.
• Produce quality metrics for releases ensuring software meets or exceeds published metrics and quality benchmarks.
• Detect bug issues and log them.
• Prepare defect reports.
• Development of new or evolvement of automated methods and techniques that ensure the quality of development covering functional and non-functional tests.
• Drive improvements to quality assurance and identify gaps.

 Essential Experience

• Commercial experience in Software Testing.
• Demonstrable test automation scripting
• Open Source software testing experience.
• Exposure to Jira/ GitLab/ CI/CD pipelines.
• Commercial experience of testing enterprise level systems that incorporate microservice architectures and web applications.
• RESTful API principles, testing and performance.
• Test automation tools, such as Cypress, Junit or Selenium/Cucumber. 
• TDD and BDD tools and techniques
• Developing acceptance criteria utilising TDD.

• Regression testing.
• Working collaboratively with software and non-software professionals in an agile (scrum), fast paced environment.
• Critical thinker with superb problem-solving skills
• Security testing.
• UI accessibility testing
• CI/CD.
• Data creation and curation
• Performance & load testing.

 Desirable Experience

• Basics of Docker/Containers/Kubernetes.
• Basics of MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL databases.
• Version control tools (preferably GitLab). 
• Proficient with Jira and Confluence. 
• Knowledge of Gitlab CI/CD pipeline.
• DevOps practices and principles.
• AWS services.
• XML/JSON.
• Working with large databases.
• Tools: SVN, Git, Tomcat, Apache, Jenkins.
• API and web services (REST).
• Linux/Unix.

 Personal Attributes

• Well organised, with the ability to delve into software issues and detect the fault 
• Works well with others, with good face-to-face communication skills - written & verbal - able to explain technical issues and solutions to peers
• Has passion, motivation and can easily adapt to learn and apply new technologies 
• Commercially aware 
• Ability to proactively engage project managers
• Excellent problem-solving ability, well organized - able to plan own work and track progress against a plan

Working here

Ricardo is an exciting and rewarding place to work and you have the opportunity to make a difference. You will work with teams of talented, dedicated, and supportive individuals. Alongside having a fantastic opportunity to develop your career with us through our broad range of projects, mentoring opportunities and a personalised approach to your learning and development. We are always keen to hear from people who have driven, ambition and a flair for innovative thinking.

Wellbeing and work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that's working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential. Our People are important to us, and we take pride in our wellbeing programmes and policies that support individuals including flexible working, carers policy, mental health first aiders and readily available support through our extensive Employee Assistance programme.

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and to ensure an enclusive culture, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Benefits

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.