Quality Assurance Technician

OVERALL SUMMARY

An opportunity has arisen for an experienced individual with a passion for financial markets to join an established and well-respected market maker, Winterflood Securities Limited.

Reporting to the Quality Assurance Supervisor, the Quality Assurance Technician will play a key role in driving robust quality assurance and best practices across the business, supporting the continuous improvement of QA and testing processes.

The successful candidate will be a highly motivated self-starter with a passion for technology and a deep understanding of the technology life cycle. They will be a proactive problem solver with excellent communication and interpersonal skills, seeking to build a career in Quality Assurance within the financial services industry.

Candidates should have extensive experience within the QA function, including test execution in a financial services environment. A solid understanding of both Waterfall and Agile delivery methodologies is essential, along with the ability to adapt between the two. Strong time management and organizational skills are required, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and meet strict deadlines effectively.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Create and maintain test cases that are well structured, adhere to standards, and can be easily followed

• Conduct rigorous QA Testing throughout the development process, identifying any potential issues / defects, reporting them back to the Development team.

• Work closely with the software development team and QA peers to help deliver high quality solutions in a timely manner.

• Be able to meet tight deadlines whilst adhering to industry standards in an FCA regulated environment.
• Support automation by identifying key test scenarios to support an automated regression set
• Utilise technical documentation and acceptance criteria to formulate concise test cases
• Ensure traceability of test cases by associating with Business demand through appropriate test management tools
• Derive edge case and negative test cases through experience of the systems / components under test
• Manual testing (Regression/Functional/Security/External API/Staging etc);
• Targeting exploratory testing
• To ensure potential technical issues are raised with developers or IT as appropriate, considering system performance, resilience and capacity requirements when testing software;
• Defect management through to fix and retest;
• Coach and mentor team members on quality practices gained through previous experiences
• Peer Review of test cases
• To work closely with stakeholders, including key business stakeholders and software developers to ensure the delivery of high quality solutions;
• To use knowledge of business processes to challenge proposed system changes to ensure these are robust, and that any exceptions or edge cases are planned for in the solution design;
• Idea creation on improving the QA practices and present those to the QA Supervisor and QA team

WE WOULD LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU IF:

• Strong background in manual functional, regression and exploratory testing
• 5 years+ experience working as a QA working within a financial institution.
• Experience of QA testing across multiple platforms
• Experience of API testing
• Knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server

IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL BUT IT WOULD BE GREAT IF YOU:

• ISTQB qualified.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills to deal with stakeholders at various levels.
• Computer Science / IT degree or equivalent.
• Scrum Master Certification
• JIRA
• AWS
• Awareness of Automation Tooling / Standards e.g. Selenium / Eclipse / Cucumber
• BDD / TDD

Benefits

• Competitive salary inclusive of discretionary annual bonus & annual pay review
• Work Abroad Policy for up to 15 days per year
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays and additional well-being day
• Option to purchase an additional 5 days holiday per year
• Flexible working options available, including hybrid working
• Pension scheme up to 10% employer contribution
• Sharesave scheme
• Income Protection & Life insurance (4 x salary core level of cover)
• Private health care via BUPA
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Discounted Gym Membership
• Variety of travel to work schemes

At Close Brothers we look to recruit individuals from all different backgrounds and encourage you to apply even if you don't tick every box. We celebrate diversity, promote inclusivity and are open to discuss flexible work options to help you balance your work and home life.

We appreciate that from time to time, recruitment agencies will have speculative CVs that they may wish to submit to our Talent Acquisition team in relation to a specific role.

To avoid any ambiguity around fees, please note that speculative CVs received by Close Brothers, that have not been authorised in advance, by us, will be ineligible for an agency fee. Thank you.

Winterflood Securities is a leading market maker committed to providing liquidity and flexible execution services to retail brokers, asset managers and institutional investors.

Winterflood's strengths are a combination of traditional trading values and the performance of our own cutting edge technology. Our experienced team of traders helps clients achieve high quality execution in over 15,000 tradable instruments including UK, European and North American Equities together with Investment Trusts, Exchange Traded Products, Fixed Income, Structured Products and Funds. Founded in 1988, Winterflood has gone from being a niche market maker in the UK Small Cap market, to a mature, diverse and major liquidity provider across multiple asset classes in the UK and European markets.

Winterflood is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Winterflood Securities is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Close Brothers Group plc, a specialist financial services group which makes loans, takes deposits, trades securities and provides advice and investment management solutions to a wide range of clients. Close Brothers Group plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a member of the FTSE 250.