Test Engineer - Government Digital Service - SEO

Location

Bristol, London, Manchester

About the job

Job summary

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is the digital centre of government. We are responsible for setting, leading and delivering the vision for a modern digital government. 

Our priorities are to drive a modern digital government, by: 

1. joining up public sector services
2. harnessing the power of AI for the public good
3. strengthening and extending our digital and data public infrastructure
4. elevating leadership and investing in talent
5. funding for outcomes and procuring for growth and innovation
6. committing to transparency and driving accountability

We are home to the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (I.AI), the world-leading GOV.UK and at the forefront of coordinating the UK’s geospatial strategy and activity. We lead the Government Digital and Data function and champion the work of digital teams across government. 

We’re part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and employ more than 1,000 people all over the UK, with hubs in Manchester, London and Bristol. 

The Government Digital Service is where talent translates into impact. From your first day, you’ll be working with some of the world’s most highly-skilled digital professionals, all contributing their knowledge to make change on a national scale. 

Join us for rewarding work that makes a difference across the UK. You'll solve some of the nation’s highest-priority digital challenges, helping millions of people access services they need. 

Job description

Government Assurance Services (GAS) is a cross-government digital platform transforming how central government manages assurance and approvals. It provides a single “front door” for departments to register initiatives, navigate assurance requirements and progress business cases through approval routes. 

GAS sits at the centre of wider assurance and funding reform, addressing a fragmented landscape where processes are duplicated, unclear and manually intensive. The service brings together multiple assurance journeys into a unified digital experience, supported by a shared data model and reusable components. 

The platform supports a range of functions including digital, commercial and funding approvals, and is designed to scale without creating bespoke solutions for each new requirement. Delivery operates in a complex and evolving policy context, with dependencies across multiple central functions and organisations. 

The GAS team works across organisational boundaries to design and deliver an end-to-end assurance experience, working closely with departments, functional teams and senior stakeholders to drive adoption and improve outcomes.  

This role is critical to ensuring quality delivery across the platform, while identifying opportunities for process improvement and innovation. You will take responsibility for ensuring that our services meet the highest standards of functional and non-functional quality, collaborating across a multidisciplinary team to design and execute comprehensive test plans that cover all aspects of the product life cycle.  

This is an exciting opportunity to play a key role in driving testing excellence. 

Our platform runs on Mendix. 

As a Test Engineer, you’ll:  

• develop and maintain test automation frameworks and automated scripts using industry-standard tools
• collaborate with stakeholders including product managers, developers, and architects to foster a culture of quality
• design and execute comprehensive test plans and test cases, ensuring full coverage of functional, regression, and integration testing
• work with development teams to drive shift-left testing practices by integrating automated tests into the software development lifecycle and active participation in early stages
• analyse test results to identify trends, risks, and patterns, helping to drive proactive quality improvements
• actively participate in daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and refinement sessions to identify risks, gaps and test dependencies 

Person specification

We’re interested in people who have:

• strong experience in software testing across the full SDLC, from gathering requirements to delivering production-ready solutions. Includes test strategy, test analysis, automation, defect management, and reporting using Cucumber/Gherkin, or equivalent structured approaches   
• proven experience in web services, REST and developing and maintaining test automation frameworks for UI and API using tools such as Playwright, Storybook, Test Complete or BrowserStack, and programming languages such as JavaScript or TypeScript   
• the ability to contribute to the design, optimization, coding, testing and documentation of small scale to large, complex or mission critical applications with the ability to clearly communicate risks and the impact of defects to stakeholders  
• experience designing, building, maintaining and executing tests that align to user needs and requirements, such as Integrating tests into CI/CD Pipelines, and non-functional testing requirements.   
• strong collaboration skills, communicating effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders and working closely with cross-functional teams to embed quality engineering best practices throughout the SDLC   
• experience of Agile testing, TDD/BDD, and using defect and root cause analysis to improve software quality.  
• experience contributing to continuous improvement of quality testing approaches, plans and strategies and staying updated with the latest advancements in testing tools, frameworks, and methodologies