Automation Test Lead in Bristol

Are you a senior automation and quality engineering professional who wants their work to make a real difference to patients, the public, and the UK research community?

The Health Research Authority (HRA) is looking for an Automation Test Lead to play a pivotal role in transforming how health and social care research is approved and delivered across the UK. This is a senior leadership role within HRA Digital, working on a major national programme to build a new Integrated Research Application and Workflow system designed using microservices architecture.

As Automation Test Lead, you will provide strategic and technical leadership for test automation and non-functional testing across multiple engineering squads. You will own and evolve our core automation frameworks (including Cucumber, Playwright, and K6), embed quality engineering practices into our CI/CD pipelines, and help ensure confident, reliable releases for critical national services.

You will set standards, coach and guide engineers, and work closely with developers, product managers, and delivery leads to ensure quality is built in from the start. You will also act as a key escalation point for risks and deputise for the Head of Test when required.

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Main duties of the job

In this role, you will:

• Set and maintain test quality and engineering standards across multiple agile squads.
• Own and continuously improve automated functional and non-functional test frameworks, integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
• Lead and support Automation Engineers, ensuring high-quality, maintainable and reliable test automation.
• Define and manage automation and QA branching strategies to support parallel releases and complex delivery schedules.
• Champion an automation-first and continuous testing approach, enabling early risk identification.
• Own and manage regression suites, keeping them lean, relevant and valuable.
• Support squads across UI, API, integration and performance testing using modern tools such as Playwright, Postman, GitHub, Azure DevOps and K6.
• Review automation code and test design, reducing flakiness and technical debt.
• Work closely with technical and non-technical stakeholders, clearly communicating quality risks and test outcomes.
• Contribute to HRA Digital test strategy, quality assurance documentation and wider test governance.

About us

At the HRA, we are committed to fostering a supportive and inclusive working environment where we actively invest in the development and empowerment of our staff, enabling them to perform at their best. We strive to promote a healthy workplace culture where wellbeing, collaboration, and professional growth are valued and encouraged.

Working at the HRA, we support flexible working, recognising that home based or hybrid arrangements provides us with the most productive environment to work well. Where possible, we’ll offer a working pattern that suits you.

The HRA offers home based contracts for all locations. Newcastle, Manchester and Nottingham based staff can be office based and hybrid working arrangements are also possible. We encourage you to speak with us to explore how this could be accommodated.

We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace that promotes and values diversity. We know from experience that different ideas, perspectives and backgrounds create a stronger, more creative workplace that helps us to deliver the best services. We welcome applications which represent the rich diversity of our community: age, disability, gender identity and expression, ethnicity, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation and other diverse characteristics, and we have policies in place to ensure that all applicants are treated fairly and consistently at every stage of the recruitment process.

Person Specification

Qualifications

• Educated to master’s level or equivalent in an Information Systems (IS), Information Technology (IT), Computer Science discipline or demonstrable equivalent professional experience operating at this level.
• Certified in ISTQB Foundation.
• Certification in Microsoft technologies and/or automation tooling (e.g. Azure, Playwright, Cucumber, performance tooling) or demonstrable equivalent experience.

Knowledge, Skills and Expertise

• Expert-level knowledge and hands‑on experience in designing, developing, maintaining and evolving scalable automation frameworks, with clear ownership of standards, structure, and best practices.
• Strong understanding of test pyramids, testability, and automation at multiple levels (API, UI, integration).
• Demonstrated experience in continuous coding, refactoring, and improving automation codebases.
• Proven ability to conduct automation script and code reviews, ensuring consistency, quality, maintainability, and alignment with agreed standards.
• Comprehensive knowledge of code version control and collaboration tools, including GitHub and Azure DevOps.
• Strong experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous testing and fast feedback.
• Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases, including test data creation, validation, and environment management.

Experience

• Proven experience owning and maintaining automated regression suites, ensuring reliability, relevance, and performance over time.
• Ability to identify and reduce test flakiness, technical debt, and maintenance overhead within automation solutions.
• Significant experience working as an Automated Test Engineer, progressing to a lead or senior role within a test or quality engineering team.
• Experience managing automated test execution within build and release pipelines, including reporting and failure triage.

Analytical and Judgemental Skills

• Strong judgement in translating complex business and technical requirements into clear, testable automated scenarios.
• Ability to prioritise effectively in a fast‑paced environment with changing requirements and uncertainty.

Interpersonal Skills

• Strong technical leadership skills with the ability to support and guide test engineers in automation design, coding practices, and tooling usage. Act as a subject matter expert for automation and non-functional testing.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, including written English skills sufficient to summarise complex technical and quality issues into clear, concise documentation. Verbal English skills to confidently articulate technical concepts, procedural issues, and participate in complex technical discussions with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Other

• Commitment to inclusivity and valuing diversity.

Employer name

Health Research Authority

Address

Bristol

Temple Quay House, 2 The Square, Temple Quay

Job location

Bristol

Reference number

980-HRA7986977-NS-C