Job Title Senior Quality Assurance Engineer
Job Reference DIA0895/CH
Post Type
Division Science
Salary information Circa £33k
Application deadline Open Vacancy


Job Description

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. Located at Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, we enable world-leading research across a wide range of scientific disciplines and industrial applications. Our User Administration System enables the submission and review of proposals to use the facility, as well as scheduling and managing visits and experiments. The system is used by external facility users and Diamond staff; the principal users are currently the Diamond User Office team, who are the first point of contact for all users. 

We are looking for a senior quality assurance engineer to lead the software testing in our small but growing User Administration System team. The team is starting an exciting new project to develop a new User Administration System, using an Agile development process. This is an important project for Diamond, to which the successful candidate will make a significant contribution.

To work within the User Administration System team on demonstrating that the software developed is fit for the purpose of enabling effective user administration at Diamond.

  • Manage software testing, including planning, estimating and monitoring, and supervise anyone else involved in testing;
  • Review the system design to ensure it facilitates effective testing, and make wider suggestions for improvements, consulting with system users and analysing their requirements;
  • Design test objectives to verify that the system meets its functional and non-functional requirements, including usability, performance and security, and validate the objectives with system users;
  • Write test scripts, automating them where effective to do so and/or required for load testing, and keep them up-to-date as the system changes;
  • Test each software release, closing resolved issues and prioritising regression tests to be run, and report the results;
  • Report faults in the system, and communicate with developers;
  • Document all work, including instructions on how to test the system;
  • Produce and maintain documentation describing system operation for its users, and train them in system use;
  • Develop and maintain expertise in software testing tools and techniques, advise team on their use, and champion the role of testing to all stakeholders.

Qualification & Experience - Essential

  • Effective team worker;
  • Ability to interact effectively with staff at all levels;
  • Excellent communication skills;
  • Methodical and tenacious;
  • Self motivated, interested in keeping pace with software testing best practice
  • Attention to detail;
  • Experience of leading testing in a team containing software developers and testers;
  • Experience of web application testing using web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox;
  • Experience of using testing support tools such as Quality Centre and JIRA;
  • Writing and executing test scripts for dynamic testing;
  • Maintaining automated test scripts.

Qualification & Experience - Desirable

  • ISTQB Advanced Level or ISEB Practitioner (or lesser) in Software Testing;
  • Experience of agile development processes such as Scrum;
  • Experience of load testing using tools such as LoadRunner;
  • Experience of automating web browser tests using a tool such as Selenium;
  • Technical writing.

Further Information

Applying for employment

For further details on applying for employment at Diamond, please visit our 'Application Form' page.

Appointments will be made depending on the skills and experience of the candidate. Electronic Diamond application forms in MS-Word are preferred. These should be emailed to recruitment@diamond.ac.uk



Other information