Senior Test Engineer - HO - SEO
Government Digital & Data -
Location
2 Ruskin Square, Croydon CR0 2WF, Soapworks, Manchester M5 3LZ, Vulcan House, Sheffield S3 8NU, Warehouse K London E16 1DR, Glasgow HMPO Northgate G4 0BT.
About the job
Job summary
The Quality Assurance industry is at a critical juncture as part of the Digital age and the next wave of disruptive technological advances, and we are looking for people who are passionate about Quality Assurance and Testing to join our community led team embedded across all the Home Office’s business areas.
The Quality Assurance and Test (QAT) function in the Home Office is one of the largest in the industry, involving circa 850+ specialists. We use new technology, platforms and ways of working to help development teams meet user needs and make the delivery of services even better. Joining our team will mean you are well positioned to help shape the future, providing a balanced and data-driven approach to Quality Assurance to best support the effective delivery of Home Office goals.
Job description
As a Senior Test Engineer, you will adopt an engineering approach to achieving quality. You will be involved in assuring, measuring, and building quality into every phase of the software development life cycle. In doing so, you will seek to implement product level Test Engineering approaches which are in line with the portfolio Test engineering approach and QAT Test Engineering principles.
You will be involved in solving engineering challenges of QAT approaches adopted in projects that you work with. This involves developing and running scalable tests and processes that are faster, frequent, and continuous. You will be expected to build relationships with Software engineering, DevOps, Product and Project delivery partners to help make sure QAT is embedded by default into the development approach.
You will seek guidance and support from other members of the Test Engineering community to help develop your own technical and delivery management skills.
You’ll lead the test engineering strategy for your product area, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle. You’ll define and implement test approaches that align with portfolio-wide standards and Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) principles.
You’ll be responsible for ensuring quality is built in from the start—measuring, assuring, and continuously improving it at every stage. You’ll stay current with emerging tools and techniques, evaluating their potential to enhance delivery outcomes.
This role also involves mentoring others and actively contributing to the QAT Test Engineering community. You’ll champion the value of quality assurance across the wider GDaD profession, helping to shape a culture of excellence.
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
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
