Senior Test Engineer - Registers of Scotland - SEO
Government Digital & Data -
Location
Home / Office hybrid working. Offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh. While many team activities and community events will take place in-person, we expect a flexible hybrid approach, with time spent in either office based on business needs.
About the job
Job summary
Put your career on the map
Total Remuneration: starting at £50,411 with annual progression increasing to £59,353
Pay Supplement: The base salary for this role is £46,677 - £54,957. This job qualifies for Digital, Data and Technology Annual Pay supplement 8% which is included in the total remuneration above.
Pension: 28.97% of base salary (RoS contribution)
Annual Leave: 38 days annual holiday, increasing to 42 days with length of service.
Duration: Permanent
Working Pattern: 35 hours per week. We are a flexible employer and will consider a variety of working patterns.
Location: Home / Office hybrid working. Offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh. While many team activities and community events will take place in-person, we expect a flexible hybrid approach, with time spent in either office based on business needs.
Grade: Senior Executive Officer (Please Note: If this campaign establishes a reserve list, we may make an offer at a lower grade. Any offer will be discussed with you before it is confirmed)
Closing date: 12 October at 11.59pm
Registers of Scotland (RoS)
Join an award-winning organisation recognised for its technology and innovation. Registers of Scotland is a world-leading pioneer in land and property registration. Our full-stack teams design, architect, and build all our registration products in-house. We work to create digital solutions for the people of Scotland. You will get an opportunity to nurture your creativity and develop with us through access to the latest data, software engineering and product delivery techniques.
Job description
Our Tech stack
Languages & Frameworks: Java Spring Boot, Python Flask, TypeScript React
Testing & QA: Cypress, Playwright, React Testing Library, Axe-core, Postman
CI/CD & DevOps: GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, OpenShift, AWS CDK
Monitoring & Logging: Grafana, AWS OpenSearch. Elasticsearch
Code Quality: SonarQube
Data & Migrations: PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Secrets & Security: AWS Secrets Manager, Ansible Vault, Secret Server
Please note: The listed tech stack is indicative of the environment you will be working in. There is no expectation that you are proficient in every technology listed.
Join our innovative tech team as a Senior Test Engineer and lead the delivery of high-quality testing across our platforms and services. You’ll shape testing strategies, support team development, and ensure our services are robust, accessible, and user focused. You’ll collaborate with engineers, analysts, and product teams to embed quality throughout the delivery lifecycle. This is a hands-on leadership role, ideal for someone passionate about testing, automation, and inclusive digital services. You will also take ownership of test tooling decisions, define automation framework architecture, and lead CI/CD test integration
improvements.
What We’re Looking For :
- You’re committed to driving quality and continuous improvement across teams.
- You’re confident mentoring and developing others and enjoy helping colleagues grow.
- You’re proactive and take ownership of testing strategy and delivery.
- You care about inclusive services and embedding accessibility into how teams work.
- You enjoy collaboration and can influence and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
On a typical day you will…
- Define, lead, and continuously improve test strategies, plans, and processes across multiple delivery teams.
- Promote test automation and continuous integration practices across development workflows.
- Lead the design, maintenance, and evolution of automated test suites and frameworks.
- Take ownership of test tooling strategy, including evaluation and standardisation across teams.
- Advocate for early involvement of testing and quality assurance in product lifecycle planning across the organisation.
- Lead accessibility best practice within the team and contribute to organisation-wide accessibility standards and training.
- Challenge teams and use governance structures to identify and reduce accessibility-related delivery risks.
- Manage, mentor, and develop testers of varying levels, supporting career progression and skills development.
- Lead the recruitment, onboarding, and development of testing talent.
- Represent test and accessibility interests across departments and in cross-government communities of practice.
- Collaborate with delivery teams to ensure robust test coverage across functional, non-functional, exploratory, and accessibility areas.
- Work with developers to identify test scenarios and contribute to code quality through review and feedback.
- Ensure testing efforts cover cross-cutting concerns, including security, performance, usability, and accessibility.
- Identify testing risks early and take preventative action to mitigate impact on delivery.
- Lead defect management processes, using patterns and trends to drive quality improvements.
- Manage stakeholder expectations and communication during defect triage and resolution.
- Lead incident investigation and root cause analysis for live service issues.
- Drive the integration of test activities into CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins and GitLab.
- Support test coverage analysis using code metrics and ensure test code quality standards are met.
Person specification
Key Responsibilities
Essential Criteria – Skills and Attributes for Success
Experience/Technical:
We will assess you against the following Experience and Technical skills during the application and assessment process:
Technical Skills
- Strong experience designing and executing a range of test types: functional, exploratory, data integrity, and accessibility.
- Experience testing data integrity across front-end and database layers, ensuring CRUD operations and constraints are enforced.
- Skilled in structured test design techniques, including boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, decision tables, and state transition diagrams.
- Strong experience with API testing methodologies including HTTP methods, response validation, token handling, and status codes.
- Able to automate API workflows, including dynamic token extraction and reuse across requests.
- Skilled in automating tests using frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and scripting languages like Python or JavaScript.
- Proficient in Postman, BrowserStack, and accessibility tools (e.g. AXE, screen readers).
- Experience conducting accessibility audits and providing actionable recommendations.
- Confident with assistive technologies and accessibility evaluation methods.
- Solid knowledge of SQL and experience with relational and non-relational databases (e.g. MongoDB).
- Comfortable using command line tools and Git for version control, including branching and merging.
- Experienced in configuring and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g. Jenkins, GitLab) and integrating automated tests.
- Familiarity with monitoring and logging tools such as Grafana and Elasticsearch for debugging and trace analysis.
- Able to lead decisions around test tooling selection and framework architecture.
Experience
- Significant experience in test management and coaching within agile teams.
- Proven ability to lead the implementation of test strategy and drive quality improvements across services.
- Experience managing risk, analysing defect trends, and influencing delivery practices across teams.
- Active participation in test or accessibility communities and a track record of advocating best practices.
- Experience mentoring teams in scripting and technical debugging, including log analysis using stack traces.
- Experience contributing to test coverage analysis using code metrics and maintaining test code quality standards.
- Experience leading the design of automation frameworks or selecting tooling architecture for test suites.
- Demonstrated leadership in integrating automated testing in CI/CD pipelines and managing tooling infrastructure.
Behaviours
We will assess you against the following behaviours during the assessment process:
- Communicating and Influencing
- Managing a Quality Service
- Developing Self and Others
