Senior Quality Engineer

Location: National

Closing Date: 1st February 2026

Interviews: w/c 16th February 2026

Grade: 7 (MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)

Salary:

• London: £63,343 - £78,225 (which may include an allowance of up to £14,882)
• National: £58,511 - £73,450 (which may include an allowance of up to £14,939)

Working pattern: Full-Time/Part-time/Flexible working

Contract Type: Permanent

Vacancy number: 13915

We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office.

The Role

We’re recruiting for a Senior Quality Engineer here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative Digital Probation and Legal Aid Agency (LAA) team. This role aligns against Senior Test Engineer from the Government Digital and Data Framework. The work we do is incredibly important to public safety and to the people under probation supervision. Probation Digital builds and supports digital services that probation practitioners rely on every day to manage risk, record accurate information, and deliver effective supervision. These services directly support better outcomes for individuals, communities and the justice system as a whole. LAA Digital seeks to provide swift access to legal aid for those who need it and ensure efficient payment to providers of those services. As a Senior Quality Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring that digital services are reliable, scalable, and of high quality. Working alongside a multidisciplinary team, you will adopt a strategic approach to quality, ensuring test strategies and plans mitigate risk to the business goals. You will design and execute functional and non-functional tests, design and implement test automation frameworks to assist with testing and enable quality across multiple teams. This is a hands-on role where you will have the opportunity to apply best practices, develop test automation, and integrate quality at every stage of development.

The Community

You will be part of a collaborative and supportive engineering community, working with developers, product managers, user researchers, designers, business analysts, and delivery managers to embed quality into digital solutions. We champion continuous learning, open communication, and agile methodologies, ensuring our teams thrive in an environment that is both inclusive and transparent. We subscribe to the manifesto for agile software development. We’re open and transparent. We believe in building quality into our products, systems and services and that quality is everyone’s responsibility.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work in multidisciplinary teams to deliver high-impact digital services for Probation Digital and LAA Digital.
• Provide technical and strategic leadership for multiple product teams, ensuring alignment with service outcomes and business goals.
• Design and develop risk-based test strategies and plans that integrate testing throughout the entire software development lifecycle.
• Advance automation initiatives, extending and standardising automated testing solutions using appropriate tools and frameworks.
• Enable whole-team involvement in quality assurance activities at every phase of delivery.
• Implement shift-left testing practices, ensuring early defect detection and prevention.
• Contribute to the wider Justice Digital engineering community, sharing knowledge, mentoring junior engineers, and promoting best practices.
• Continuously evolve and optimise test strategies, processes, and tooling.
• Foster effective communication around quality and testing within and beyond your teams.
• People manage and develop other Quality Engineers, supporting their growth and career progression.

Benefits

• 37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
• Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow.
• Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024.
• 25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave.
• Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.
• Nurturing professional and interpersonal networks including those for Carers & Childcare, Gender Equality, PROUD and SPIRIT.
• Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location).
• Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers.
• 5 days volunteering paid leave.
• Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.

Person Specification

Essential:

• Overseeing testing across multiple teams and throughout the entire software development lifecycle, demonstrating both technical and test leadership.
• Practical experience of designing and implementing various test types to deliver comprehensive test coverage.
• Design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks for UI and API testing using tools such as Postman, Selenium, Cypress, or Playwright.
• Applied automation and testing best practices, improving test automation frameworks and delivery pipelines.
• Advocating for quality activities in an Agile context.
• A collaborative mindset, mentoring, coaching, growing and inspiring others to adopt holistic testing practices.
• Practical experience with non-functional testing (Performance, Security, Accessibility) and related tooling.
• Strong understanding of shift-left principles, including CI/CD pipelines.
• Collaborate with others to define success criteria and quality metrics to measure and demonstrate progress.
• Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for SC clearance.

We welcome the unique contribution diverse applicants bring and do not discriminate based on culture, ethnicity, race, nationality or national origin, age, sex, gender identity or expression, religion or belief, disability status, sexual orientation, educational or social background or any other factor. Our values are Purpose, Humanity Openness and Together.

How to Apply

Candidates must submit a CV and Cover Letter (750 words) which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above.

Application Guidance

Please access the following link for guidance on how to apply and how to complete a Personal Statement.

In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:

• Working Together
• Managing a quality service
• Communicating and influencing
• Developing self and others
• Changing and improving

A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above. Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 1-hour panel interview, which may include a test/task, held via video conference.

Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on:

• “Overseeing testing across multiple teams and throughout the entire software development lifecycle, demonstrating both technical and test leadership.”
• “Design, build, and maintain automated test frameworks for UI and API testing using tools such as Postman, Selenium, Cypress, or Playwright.”
• “A collaborative mindset, mentoring, coaching, growing and inspiring others to adopt holistic testing practices.”

The panel will be conducting a sift on the following criteria from the Person Specification above in addition to some of the pre-sift criteria:

• “Practical experience with non-functional testing (Performance, Security, Accessibility) and related tooling.”
• “Strong understanding of shift-left principles, including CI/CD pipelines.”
• “Practical experience of designing and implementing various test types to deliver comprehensive test coverage.”
• “Applied automation and testing best practices, improving frameworks and delivery pipelines.”

Candidates who do not demonstrate examples/details of their experience of the requirements stated under the Person Specification above in their Cover Letter will be rejected on this basis.

Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application. A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made.

Use of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action.

Terms & Conditions

Please review our Terms and Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.