Principal Test Engineer Cloud Platforms - HO - G6
Government Digital & Data -
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.
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:
- working within a cloud platform setting, especially one focussed on AWS. You will be setting the overall direction for QAT engineering and developing and implementing innovative approaches for our strategic cloud platform, encompassing DevSecOps best practices
- partnering with engineering and senior delivery partners to make sure Infrastructure as Code test engineering frameworks are embedded by default in the engineering approach, implementing all levels of a modern test pyramid that map to a modern CI/CD pipeline
- building, mentoring and leading quality engineering teams by providing support and guidance to more junior members and providing technical advice on improving the way we do things
- building and delivering quality engineering solutions that are scalable, efficient, and cost effective
- quantifying, measuring, and reporting on code quality and using risk-based approaches to decision making
- making the QAT practice thrive by exploiting new and emerging tools and approaches and using these to help the organisation deliver better services
Person specification
Essential criteria
As a Principal Test Engineer you will have experience of:
- 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
- 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
SFIA capability framework
Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all Quality Assurance & Testing levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework: All skills A–Z — English (sfia-online.org)
We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process.
SFIA levels of responsibility – Use the SFIA Levels of responsibility to understand what would be expected for each Technical Skill listed below.
SFIA Technical skills
The essential technical skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework. Please see below for the relevant skills required for your role.
