Platform Test Lead in Belfast

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) has a clear mission - to grow the economy. Our role is to help businesses invest, grow and export to create jobs and opportunities right across the country. The Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) directorate develops and operates tools and services to support us in this mission.

As Platform Test Lead, you will play a critical role in ensuring the DBT Platform is robust, secure, and scalable by embedding quality assurance into its design and delivery. You’ll lead the development of platform-wide test strategies, support automated testing across infrastructure and services, and collaborate with technical leaders to drive continuous improvement. This role supports DBT’s digital transformation goals and contributes to the strategic evolution of the platform.

This is a technical and strategically critical role within our Technology portfolio at DBT, overseeing a platform that supports internal and external services. You will lead the evolution of the DBT Platform’s testing strategy, ensuring it is robust, secure, scalable and efficient. You will work closely with platform engineers, technical architects, cyber security and service teams to embed quality assurance into the platform’s design and delivery. You will play a key role in shaping how we test and assure platform capabilities, bringing your experience of test automation, infrastructure testing and DevOps practices. You’ll work across DDaT to understand future needs and help teams validate and deliver against them. You’ll also contribute to platform governance and technical decision-making, ensuring testing supports strategic goals.

This is a technical leadership role requiring experience with cloud-hosted platforms. The successful candidate will be well-versed in implementing and optimising automated testing, deployment pipelines, and performance metrics like DORA. You will have an understanding of emerging technologies, enabling you to guide innovation and resilience across the platform. You must have a proven track record of leading test engineering for large-scale platform operations or infrastructure products, ensuring stability, scalability and strategic alignment with organisational goals.

Main responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of automated test frameworks for platform components and services.
• Define and own platform-level test strategies, including integration, performance, security, and end-to-end testing across multi-account environments.
• Collaborate with Platform Engineers, Technical Architects, and Cyber SMEs to ensure testing supports platform priorities.
• Drive improvements in deployment testing, enabling faster, more reliable releases with reduced support burden.
• Support FinOps and observability initiatives by ensuring test coverage includes cost-impacting behaviours and performance metrics.
• Champion testability in platform design, simplifying environment setup and enabling self-service testing for service teams.
• Coach and mentor engineers in test automation, quality assurance, and continuous delivery practices.
• Monitor test suite health, reduce technical debt, and ensure test infrastructure is scalable and cost-effective.

Person specification

It is essential that you have:

• Proven experience in test automation for infrastructure and platform engineering, including maturing PaaS/SaaS products.
• Strong coding skills (Python or Java), with experience building reusable test frameworks, utilities, and using BDD approaches (e.g. Gherkin/Cucumber) for collaborative testing.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerisation (Docker/Kubernetes), cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform).
• Familiarity with observability and performance testing tools (Datadog, ELK, Grafana, Locust, JMeter), plus an understanding of cyber security testing principles and logging requirements.
• Ability to coach multidisciplinary teams, embed quality practices in agile delivery, and apply FinOps-aware testing approaches (e.g. cost-impact validation, resource optimisation).

It is desirable that you have:

• Knowledge of platform engineering patterns (e.g. sidecar architecture, secure base images, technical contracts).
• Familiarity with accessibility and security testing standards (e.g. OWASP, WCAG).

Alongside your salary, DBT contributes £17,991 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.

Learning and development tailored to your role, an environment with flexible working options, a culture encouraging inclusion and diversity, and a Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%.

If you would like to find out more about the role, the Platform Engineering team and what it’s like to work at DBT, we are holding a Hiring Manager Q&A session for this role where you can virtually 'meet the team' on Wednesday 25th February at 12.30pm.