Platform SQA Engineer

Insight Global is hiring a Platform SQA Engineer to support a payments technology organisation backing a portfolio of global payment programmes. The portfolio spans ISO 20022 migrations (e.g., CHAPS, TARGET2, SWIFT CBPR+), real‑time payment (RTP) capabilities, modernisation of payment engines and integration layers, and delivery against regulatory and scheme mandates across multiple geographies.

This role is a senior, hands‑on individual contributor focused on platform‑level validation across application, business, data, infrastructure, and network layers that underpin mission‑critical payments flows. The ideal candidate brings senior experience testing complex distributed systems, deep technical breadth across enterprise platform technologies, and the ability to build automated validation within CI/CD pipelines.

The engineer will validate platform changes across on‑prem, cloud, and hybrid architectures while partnering closely with platform engineers, architects, and operations teams to ensure reliability, scalability, compliance, and on‑time delivery for scheme and regulatory timelines.

Please note, this is a long-term contract role and would require you to be on-site 3 days a week out of the office in Chester, UK.

Responsibilities

• Test all layers of modern platform architectures including application, business, data, infrastructure, and network components.
• Review platform architecture and design specifications to create detailed test strategies, plans, and automated test suites.
• Validate production and non‑production platform changes in accordance with change control, incident management, and problem‑management processes.
• Execute and automate functional, regression, integration, and performance tests across distributed platform components.
• Ensure platform validation aligns with required security, compliance, audit, and infrastructure standards.
• Automate repeatable test scenarios and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines using DevOps tooling.
• Collaborate with platform engineering teams to understand design patterns, system architecture, and integration points to ensure optimal test coverage.
• Provide quality assurance for technologies across on‑prem, cloud, and hybrid platforms.
• Identify and implement improvements to validation tooling, automation, and QA processes.
• Coordinate dependencies across multiple platform teams to support consistent delivery quality.
• Report risks, defects, test results, and platform quality metrics to technical leads and stakeholders.
• Debug and troubleshoot failures in automated test cases and platform integrations.
• Apply strong understanding of business flows, financial data, products, and services to validate platform behaviour end‑to‑end.

Must‑Haves

• Senior expeerience in software QA, platform validation, or distributed systems testing.
• Strong hands‑on experience with Java‑based platforms (Java, Spring).
• Proficiency in SQL and validating data flows on enterprise databases (Oracle, Postgres, or similar).
• Strong Linux/Unix skills, including log analysis and shell scripting (Windows experience beneficial).
• Experience testing services on enterprise middleware or app servers (WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat, or similar).
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka or IBM MQ (at least one is essential).
• Experience with Cucumber/BDD and modern automation frameworks.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and DevOps practices (Jenkins, Git, pipelines, etc.).
• Hands‑on experience validating containerized or cloud‑based deployments (OpenShift, Kubernetes, Docker).
• Strong networking fundamentals: DNS, load balancers, firewalls, proxies, routing, connectivity troubleshooting.
• Experience using observability tools such as Splunk, Grafana, or Prometheus for logs and metrics.
• Ability to troubleshoot distributed systems across multiple layers (service failures, message flows, config issues, connectivity).

Plusses

• Experience with cloud‑native monitoring (CloudWatch, Dynatrace, or similar).
• Exposure to service mesh, API gateways, or SRE practices.
• Knowledge of financial or regulated enterprise environments.
• Performance testing experience with distributed architectures.