Lead Test Engineer - HO - G7

We are looking for people who are passionate about Quality. Do you want to be part of the award-winning Home Office Quality Assurance and Testing Team (QAT) within Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT)? 

Quality is at the heart of everything we do. We provide a large-scale shared service, delivered through 750 QA professionals. It supports services that are essential for the UK! 

A strong continuous improvement culture underpins the way we work, making advancements on how quality is delivered and assured in ground breaking DevOps environments, including cloud platforms. We are a well-established, well-knit team of quality specialists and among the best in the industry!   

We won the Testing Team of the Year at the 2024 European Software Testing Awards and were also re-certified at TMMi level 5, receiving the best score globally.

These roles sit in the His Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO), Police and Public Protection Technology (PPPT) and Migration and Borders Technology Portfolio (MBTP) business areas. 

Job description

Our Lead Test Engineers are held in high regard, well sought after, and highly valued members of the teams they work in. 

We are seeking individuals with the skills required to solve engineering challenges of QAT approaches and build strong collaborator relationships. Working alongside impactful multi-disciplinary teams, you will use your technical, delivery and leadership skills to drive outstanding, industry standard quality engineering practices. Your success will be linked to the success of the teams you work with, and you will play a pivotal role in helping your team deliver outcomes, safely and securely. 

In return, we will invest in your learning and development, and you will be supported by guides in your job family, while having opportunities to mentor and be mentored. You will be a member of the test engineering practice. We invest in adopting innovative technology. We are actively developing quality strategies to assure AI based solutions, as well as its safe usage in quality engineering. Our test engineering practice will be a core part of these strategies.   

Quality Engineering Tools and Technologies we use:  

We have a wide portfolio of projects, and our vast estate covers a whole range of tools. The below is sample snapshot of some tools we use:  

• Frameworks: Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), Playwright, and several bespoke frameworks.
• DevOps: AWS, Azure, Jenkins, Drone, Concourse, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform. 
• Performance testing – Locust, JMeter.
• Other tools: Browserstack, Axe, ZAP, SonarQube.
• Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Dynatrace. 

What you will do 

Your main day to day responsibilities will be: 

• Ownership of existing test frameworks and actively reviewing them, identifying need for new frameworks, and delivering these at scale.
• Leading and coaching a team of test engineers and helping solve technical challenges that the team may require assistance with, evaluating efficacy of test engineering processes across projects and suggesting improvements. Promoting convergence, creating shared capabilities and data driven approaches within test engineering.
• Embracing innovation - evaluating tools and recommending approaches that can benefit testing. For instance, ones used for virtualisation, data mocking, contract testing or other automated integration testing techniques, and determining tools and approaches for automated test data management, test results aggregation and release management. Enabling precise, real-time reports of automation test runs and also roll-up reports.
• Managing test infrastructure usage and determining approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Using container and cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests while optimising costs.
• Working with teams to promote use of code scan, code quality, accessibility testing and observability tools.
• Participating in the QAT Test Engineering community as well as QAT recruitment to help grow it.

Person specification

UK residency and security requirements - You need to have lived in the UK for the past 5 years.

Essential Criteria

As a Lead Test Engineer, you will have experience of:

• Programming using Java to write secure, reusable, and maintainable automated tests and test utilities. You should be able to use concepts like thread management, synchronisation, resource, and memory management to increase the efficiency of test engineering solutions and be able to use scripting languages like Bash or PowerShell (Lead essential criteria).
• Using and implementing tools like Selenium, RestAssured, Serenity BDD (or similar), build tools like Maven or Gradle, code management tools like git.
• Using and implementing unit test frameworks like JUnit, assertion libraries, data serialisation tools, security best practices like OWASP Top 10 and standards such as WCAG to design automated accessibility tests.
• Extensively using CI/CD tools for pipeline automation and a solid understanding of release pipeline concepts. Familiarity with containerization platforms like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Using and implementing POM test design pattern and SOLID code design principle. Implementing coding guidelines and standards with a solid understanding of protocols and architectural styles involved in implementing tests.
• Ability to actively engage with performance testing engineers and work alongside them to identify performance bottlenecks. Ability to read, interpret and articulate performance reports. 

Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework

The technical skills listed below are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework. Please refer to the attached Home Office Skills QAT Library pack, which includes detailed descriptors of the listed skills at each level of capability to assist with your application. We use these technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process. 

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Changing and Improving
• Making Effective Decisions

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Strategic Planning (ITSP) – Level 4
• Domain Experience – Level 4
• Test, Analysis, Design and Execution – Level 3
• Automation and Tooling – Level 4
• Performance Testing – Level 4
• Integration and Assurance – Level 3

Locations - Croydon CR0 2WF, Manchester M5 3LZ, London E16 1DR, Glasgow G51 1DH, Sheffield S3 8NU

• 1 Role (HMPO): Available in London (E16 1DR) or Glasgow (G51 1DH)
• 1 Role (MBTP): Available only in Croydon (CR0 2WF)
• 2 Roles (PPPT): Available in Croydon (CR0 2WF), Manchester (M5 3LZ), or Sheffield (S3 8NU)