QA Automation Engineer / Consultant

About Methods: Methods is a £100M+ IT Services Consultancy who has partnered with a range of central government departments and agencies to transform the way the public sector operates in the UK. Established over 30 years ago and UK-based, we apply our skills in transformation, delivery, and collaboration from across the Methods Group, to create end-to-end business and technical solutions that are people-centred, safe, and designed for the future. Our human touch sets us apart from other consultancies, system integrators and software houses - with people, technology, and data at the heart of who we are, we believe in creating value and sustainability through everything we do for our clients, staff, communities, and the planet. We support our clients in the success of their projects while working collaboratively to share skill sets and solve problems. At Methods we have fun while working hard; we are not afraid of making mistakes and learning from them. Predominantly focused on the public-sector, Methods is now building a significant private sector client portfolio. Methods was acquired by the Alten Group in early 2022. Alten is a global engineering firm with approximately 57,000 employees specializing in engineering and IT services. About the role As a QA Automation Engineer, you will work within a multidisciplinary team to build quality into complex digital services. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on designing, developing and maintaining automated tests using Java. You will test APIs, user journeys and integrations across distributed services, providing reliable feedback throughout development and clear evidence to support release decisions. You will work closely with developers, DevOps engineers, business analysts, product owners and operational teams to understand requirements, identify risks and verify that business processes complete correctly. You will take ownership of automation quality, investigate failures and continually improve the reliability, coverage and maintainability of the test suites. Responsibilities Design, develop and maintain automated API, integration and end-to-end tests using Java, Serenity BDD, Cucumber, Selenium WebDriver and REST Assured. Contribute to reusable test components and maintainable automation frameworks, applying sound coding practices and participating in code reviews. Work with developers, business analysts and product owners to define testable acceptance criteria and appropriate positive, negative and boundary scenarios. Select the appropriate level of testing for each risk, balancing coverage, execution time and maintenance effort. Integrate and maintain automated tests within Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines, providing timely and actionable feedback. Test asynchronous workflows and interactions between services, including event processing, messaging, retries and failure recovery. Verify completed business outcomes through APIs, database checks and user journeys,…