Lead Test Engineer

Join an award-winning team at the Home Office and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of test engineering. We’re looking for individuals to tackle engineering challenges in QAT and build strong collaborative relationships. Working with multi-disciplinary teams, you’ll use your technical, delivery, and leadership skills to drive high-quality engineering practices. Your success will be tied to your team’s outcomes, ensuring safe and secure delivery.

In return, we’ll invest in your development, offer mentorship opportunities and support your growth. As part of the test engineering practice, you’ll contribute to innovative technology adoption and quality strategies, including AI solutions and safe usage in quality engineering.

These roles sit in the His Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO), Police and Public Protection Technology (PPPT) and Migration and Borders Technology Portfolio (MBTP) business areas. Our Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) team has earned global recognition, including:

• Testing Team of the Year 2024 at the European Software Testing Awards.
• Achieving TMMi Level 5 Certification with the highest global score.

What will you be doing?

• Own existing test frameworks and actively review them, identifying need for new frameworks, and deliver these at scale.
• Lead/coach a team of test engineers and help solve technical challenges that the team may require assistance with, evaluating efficacy of test engineering processes across projects and suggest improvements.
• Promote convergence, create shared capabilities and data driven approaches within test engineering.
• Embrace innovation - evaluate tools and recommend approaches that can benefit testing.
• Manage test infrastructure usage and determine approach to run distributed, parallel tests.
• Work with teams to promote use of code scan, code quality, accessibility testing and observability tools.
• Participate in the QAT Test Engineering community as well as QAT recruitment to help grow it.

Your skills for this role

• Programming using Java to write secure, reusable, and maintainable automated tests and test utilities.
• Using and implementing tools like Selenium, RestAssured, Serenity BDD (or similar), build tools like Maven or Gradle, code management tools like git.
• Using and implementing unit test frameworks like JUnit, assertion libraries, data serialisation tools, 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 and a solid understanding of release pipeline concepts.
• Familiarity with containerization platforms like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Ability to actively engage with performance testing engineers and work alongside them to identify performance bottlenecks.

At the Home Office, we embrace a diverse range of tools and technologies, including:

• Frameworks: Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), Playwright, and several bespoke frameworks.
• Performance testing: Locust, JMeter.
• Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Dynatrace.

Why Join Us?

• Exceptional pension: Employer contribution of 28.97%.
• Generous leave: 25 days annual leave (rising to 30 with service), 8 public holidays, and 1 day for the King’s Birthday.
• Flexible working: Options include full-time, part-time, compressed hours, job sharing, and a hybrid model (minimum 60% on-site).
• Learning and development: Access to training, technical accreditations, and funded qualifications (subject to approval).
• Recognition and inclusion: A culture that champions diversity, enhanced parental leave schemes, annual bonuses, and recognition awards.

This role requires SC clearance. To meet national security vetting requirements, you typically need to have been resident in the UK for at least three years. Unfortunately, we cannot offer sponsorship.