Senior Test Engineer - HO - SEO

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 is in the Police and Public Protection Technology (PPPT) portfolio.  PPPT is an organisation of dedicated professionals who are primarily responsible for the design, build and deployment of National Law Enforcement Systems. They ensure that they deliver highly effective, efficient systems which leverage modern digital technologies and provide world-class Law Enforcement capabilities. DDaT is making significant investments in building and scaling modern cloud platforms to host these systems. PPPT is also responsible for the running and sustainment of critical national infrastructure such as the Police National Computer (PNC), as well as a myriad of other existing national policing systems.

Job description

As a Senior Test Engineer, you will drive the test engineering approach within your product area. You will determine and implement approaches to assure, measure and build quality into every phase of the software development life cycle. You will define and implement product level test engineering strategies while ensuring that these are aligned to portfolio level Test Engineering approaches and follow QAT Test Engineering principles.

You will be responsible for solving engineering challenges of QAT approaches adopted in projects that you work with. This involves developing or enhancing frameworks that help deliver scalable tests which are faster, frequent, and continuous. You will be expected to build relationships with Software engineering, DevOps, Product and Project delivery partners.

You will provide support and guidance to a team of engineers, further developing your own delivery management and leadership skills.

To help the QAT practice thrive, you will also keep up to date with emerging tools and approaches and work out how these could help the organisation to deliver better success. You will be an active contributor and a mentor within the QAT Test Engineering community. You will also promote the value of QAT within the larger Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession community.

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), and several bespoke frameworks.
• DevOps: AWS, Jenkins, Drone, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform. 
• Performance testing: 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:

• Actively maintain existing test frameworks or help develop new ones when required. You will also undertake code refactoring where necessary.
• Develop tests that are predictable, repeatable and implement automated verification of acceptance criteria to the greatest possible extent. Review test automation code and test utility code, and configure, monitor, and trigger tests to run on demand as well as continuously evaluating the efficacy of this process.
• Determine tools and approaches for virtualisation, data mocking , contract testing or other automated integration testing techniques and determine tools and approaches for automated test data management, test results aggregation and release management. Enable precise, real-time reports of automation test runs.
• Manage test infrastructure usage and determine approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Use container & Cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests.
• Interpret data from code scan, code quality and observability tools. Agree quality thresholds and provide actionable feedback in aiding quality improvement.
• Participate in the QAT Test Engineering community to help grow it.

Person specification

Essential skills 

You’ll have a demonstrable passion for Test Engineering, with the following skills or some experience in: 

• Programming using Java to write secure, reusable, and maintainable automated tests and test utilities. You should be familiar with concepts like thread management, synchronisation, resource, and memory management, and scripting languages like bash or PowerShell (Lead essential criteria).
• Using tools like Selenium for front-end automation, RestAssured for API testing, Serenity BDD, build tools like Maven or Gradle and using Git to manage branches and merge requests through distributed version control.
• Working with unit test frameworks like Junit, assertion libraries and data serialisation tools, leveraging tools like Wiremock, to aid automated testing.
• Working with POM test design pattern and SOLID code design principle. Implementing coding guidelines and standards and using BDD tools like Cucumber for developing automated tests.
• Using CI/CD tools while having a good understanding of release pipelines and jobs and familiarity with containerization platforms like Docker.
• Using code quality tools like SonarQube. 

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 QAT Skills Library pack, which includes detailed descriptors of the listed skills at each level of capability to assist with your application.

Behaviours

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

• Working Together
• Communicating and Influencing
• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

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

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