About Roke
Roke offers specialist knowledge in sensors, communications, cyber, and AI and ML. We change the way organisations think and act – through dynamic insights from the analysis of multiple layers of data. We take care of the innovative, technical stuff that keeps everyone safe – that’s our mission, passion, and motivation.
Joining a team united by purpose and ambition, you’ll be at the heart of an exciting growth journey. We push technical boundaries, together. We re-invest in product innovation, and we empower our people to make a difference.
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Software Assurance Engineer to help assure the quality, resilience, and operational readiness of complex software systems. The role combines hands on operational responsibility with deep technical insight into the software stack, using automated testing and observability to expose functional, performance, and robustness issues early and continuously.
This is not a black box QA role. You will work closely with development teams, using white box knowledge of system design, code, and architecture to build confidence in software behaviour under real operational conditions.
Your Role
In this role you will work closely with software developers, users, project managers, heads of engineering, quality assurance, and IT colleagues. You will take a cross cutting view of the software lifecycle, helping ensure that systems are not only functionally correct but also reliable, observable, and performant in service.
You will support code releases, deployments, and live services, while also designing and implementing automated tests that exercise software behaviour at multiple levels. The role requires strong technical capability alongside the ability to communicate risks, trade-offs, and system behaviour clearly to a wide range of stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities & Tasks
You are a technically strong engineer who enjoys working across development, test, and operations boundaries to improve system assurance and reliability.
Key responsibilities include:
- Contribute to system reliability and availability through SRE aligned practices, including monitoring, alerting, incident analysis, and post incident learning.
- Design, implement, and maintain automated test suites to validate:
- Functional correctness
- Performance characteristics
- Stability, resilience, and failure behaviour
- Act as a white box tester, using knowledge of internal design and implementation to target risk areas within the software stack.
- Work alongside developers to build testability, observability, and resilience into software from the outset.
- Support and oversee code releases and deployments, ensuring systems are production ready.
- Develop and maintain tooling for:
- Continuous testing
- Performance and load testing
- Fault injection and robustness testing where appropriate
- Analyse system behaviour using logs, metrics, and traces to identify weaknesses or unexpected interactions.
- Document findings clearly, including test results, limitations, failure modes, and operational risks.
- Participate in sprint ceremonies, including planning, stand-ups, reviews, and retrospectives, contributing a reliability and assurance perspective.
- Collaborate with user researchers and stakeholders to ensure system behaviour meets user expectations under real-world conditions.
Skills and Experience Required
We’re looking for individuals with strong analytical thinking, an engineering mindset, and a passion for building reliable systems.
You will have experience across several of the following areas:
- Programming / scripting in languages such as C#, Python, JavaScript, or Java
- Designing and implementing automated tests (unit, integration, system, performance)
- Experience with white box testing techniques and code aware test design
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitLab CI/CD) and how testing integrates into delivery
- Version control systems (e.g. Git)
- Windows infrastructure (IIS, Windows Server) and/or Linux based systems (Ubuntu, CentOS)
- Experience with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Familiarity with relational and non relational databases (e.g. SQL Server, MongoDB, Elasticsearch)
- Observability concepts: logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting
- Scripting languages such as Bash or PowerShell
Most importantly, you are comfortable learning “just in time” and adapting tools and techniques to the needs of the system rather than forcing predefined solutions.
Qualifications and Ways of Working
As a hybrid DevOps / SRE / Software Assurance Engineer, you will have a degree level qualification in a STEM subject or equivalent practical experience.
You will be proactive, curious, and comfortable working independently or as part of a multidisciplinary team. You will be able to articulate technical risk and system behaviour clearly, and you will seek out pragmatic, proportionate approaches to improving software quality and reliability.
Why You Should Join Us
We have a competitive salary and access to a number of additional flexible benefits, which will cover Health and Wellbeing, Savings and Protection and Life, Leisure and Entertainment.
Roke has a great community of groups with shared interests. These enable people to share ideas and be passionate about tools, technologies and techniques, which interest them.
We are committed to a policy of Equal Opportunity, Diversity and Inclusion. Our working environment is friendly, creative and inclusive and support a diverse work-force and those with additional needs.
Security Information
Due to the nature of this position, we require you to be willing and eligible to achieve a minimum of SC clearance. To qualify, the candidate should be a British Citizen and have resided in the UK for the last 5 years for SC.
