Lead Test Engineer (Automation) - Home Office - G7

Location

Croydon CR0 2WF, Manchester M5 3LZ, Sheffield S3 8NU.

About the job

Job summary

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 Home Office Digital. 

This role sits within Home Office Digital’s Automation and Innovation portfolio whose work spans Home Office mission-critical operations, such as transforming Border Security and immigration processes, to revolutionising asylum case management and enhancing Counter-Terrorism capabilities. Imagine developing technology that helps reunite families, create safer communities, protect vulnerable people, and ensure smoother journeys for the millions travelling to and from the UK.  

Join Our Team 

Work with our Automation Centre, Data Science and Evaluation team, or Innovation Lab to: 

• Build solutions improving lives nationwide.
• Work with diverse AI and automation technologies.
• Collaborate with technical experts.
• Develop skills at the forefront of public sector innovation.

Help build a future-ready Home Office where innovation delivers daily impact. Ready to use cutting-edge technology to transform millions of lives across the UK? 

All QAT roles require flexibility of location, including working from supplier sites and other business locations across the UK and occasionally abroad. 

Where business needs allow some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office.

Watch this short video to hear from members of Home Office Digital talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here: Working for Home Office Digital. 

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.  

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: Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, RestAssured and several bespoke frameworks.  
• Platforms and Pipelines: PowerApps, Dynamics, Azure, AWS, GitHub Actions, Drone, Concourse, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform.   
• Performance testing – Locust, JMeter.  
• Other tools: Browserstack, Axe, ZAP, SonarQube. 
• Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Dynatrace.  

Person specification

Main responsibilities: 

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 analyst and solving 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 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.  

Essential Skills  

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

• Programming using TypeScript /JavaScript (Lead essential criteria) to write secure, reusable, and maintainable automated tests and test utilities and be able to use scripting languages like Bash or PowerShell.
• Skilled in designing and implementing Playwright‑based quality engineering frameworks, and in developing and maintaining Node.js packages to support automation tooling.
• Developing and scaling automated quality engineering solutions for PowerApps (model-driven and canvas apps), implanting 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 on Azure stack 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.