Principal Test Engineer - Cloud Platforms - G6

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 groundbreaking 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. 

This role will lead our Test Engineering team within our strategic platform, Core Cloud. The Core Cloud team is responsible for building a new strategic hosting platform using Amazon Web Services. We are taking a product-centric approach and are building squads around our products, with a focus on improving Developer Experience at the Home Office.

Job description

As the Principal Test Engineer for our strategic cloud platform, you’ll be critical to delivering test engineering and assurance and maturing the quality of our cloud platform engineering practice. This will particularly excite you if you are a quality engineering expert with a keen interest and experience in platform engineering or equally if you are an experienced platform engineer with a keen interest in quality approaches in that field.

You will set the direction for Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) and develop and implement QAT approaches. You will be responsible for ensuring we have the right test engineering teams in place across the platform and will collaborate with engineering and delivery partners to make sure QAT is embedded by default into the development approach. To help the QAT practice thrive, you will call on your expertise in emerging tools and approaches and apply these to help the organisation deliver better success.

You will be part of the leadership team leading the overall Test Engineering practice across the organisation, promoting quality outcomes and value. You will provide leadership and guidance to a team of engineers, further developing your own test engineering, delivery management and leadership skills.

You will work with senior engineering and business stakeholders, understanding their needs and translating them into a QAT approach, driven by engineering at its core. You will also work with development teams to embed QAT within the overall development approach and with industry partners to leverage the best of new and emerging tools and approaches. Within the DDaT community, you will take a lead in sharing, collaborating and promoting the value of QAT. 

QAT/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: 

• Cloud: AWS (primary) and Azure.
• Test Frameworks: Terrattest, Pytest, Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), Playwright, and several bespoke frameworks.
• DevOps: AWS LZA, GitHub and GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Drone, Concourse, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform.
• Performance testing: Locust, JMeter.
• Other tools: AWS FIS, Checkov, ZAP, SonarQube.
• Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace.

What you will do 

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Work within a cloud platform setting, especially one focussed on AWS. You will set the overall direction for QAT engineering and develop / implement innovative approaches for our strategic cloud platform, encompassing DevSecOps best practices. 
• Partner with engineering and senior delivery partners to make sure Infrastructure as Code test engineering frameworks are embedded by default in the engineering approach and implement all levels of a modern test pyramid that map to a modern CI/CD pipeline. 
• Build, mentor and lead quality engineering teams by providing support and guidance to more junior members and provide technical advice on improving the way we do things. 
• Build and deliver quality engineering solutions that are scalable, efficient, and cost effective. 
• Quantify, measure, and report on code quality and using risk-based approaches to decision making. 
• Make the QAT practice thrive by exploiting new and emerging tools / approaches and using these to help the organisation deliver better services. 

Person specification

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

Essential criteria

As a Principal Test Engineer you will have experience of:

• Selecting and deploying a broad range of tools and test automation techniques including Open-Source technologies and object-orientated design, programming languages such as Java, Python and JS, Developer tools such as AWS SDK, test tools like Pytest and Terratest, using continuous integration, deployment and release tools (Lead essential criteria)
• Working at senior leadership level, establishing and maintaining organisational level networks and actively engaging other senior leaders
• Leading a technical team of test engineers
• Developing organisational level test approaches that implement all levels of a modern test pyramid in a cloud DevSecOps environment
• Setting strategic direction at organisational level for the design of platform test approaches involving test automation environments, utilising virtualisation, and containerisation
• Designing, building, deploying and improving platform test engineering capabilities which support the implementation of QA, Testing and Software Development strategies

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:

• Managing a Quality Service
• Developing Self and Others
• Seeing the Big Picture

Technical skills

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

• Strategic Planning (ITSP) – Level 5
• Test Analysis, Design and Execution – Level 4
• Automation and Tooling – Level 5
• Performance Testing – Level 4
• Integration and Assurance – Level 4
• Domain Experience – Level 4