Operational Acceptance Tester (OAT) Engineer

Operational Acceptance Tester (OAT) - SC Cleared

Contract | Outside IR35 | Up to £375 per day
Location: Hybrid/Predominantly Remote - occasional travel to London
Security Clearance: Active SC Clearance required

We are looking for an experienced Operational Acceptance Tester (OAT) to join a major technology programme, supporting the operational readiness and production acceptance of secure, cloud-based services.

This is a hands-on testing role requiring strong experience across Operational Acceptance Testing, AWS/cloud environments, resilience, recovery, monitoring and release readiness. The successful candidate will help deliver OAT activities and work closely with DevOps, Infrastructure and Release teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) process, ensuring systems are operationally ready ahead of production deployment.
• Define OAT strategies, test plans, acceptance criteria and supporting documentation.
• Test areas including build verification, monitoring and alerting, backup and restore, resilience and recovery, logging and audit, configuration management and release management.
• Conduct resilience, failover, backup and recovery testing across cloud-based environments.
• Work closely with DevOps, Infrastructure and Release Management teams.
• Validate SLAs, security requirements and disaster recovery processes.
• Identify, document and manage defects through to resolution.
• Produce clear reporting on OAT progress, results and risks.

Experience

• Strong commercial experience in Operational Acceptance Testing/Operational Testing.
• Good understanding of OAT methodologies and operational readiness.
• Experience working with AWS and/or Azure cloud environments.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Jenkins and test automation frameworks.
• Knowledge of infrastructure monitoring and IT service management.
• Experience with Linux, databases and network protocols.
• Understanding of OWASP Top 10 security testing.
• Experience working within Agile and DevOps environments.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.

If this is the right role for you and you have the skills, please do apply.