Lead Test Engineer

Overview

Lead Test Engineer role at UK Home Office. Join an award-winning team and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of test engineering. You’ll work with multi-disciplinary teams to drive high-quality engineering practices, focusing on safe and secure delivery within QAT and UCD Professions at UK Home Office.

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.

What will you be doing?

• Own existing test frameworks and actively review them, identify the need for new frameworks, and deliver these at scale.
• Lead/coach a team of test engineers, solve technical challenges, evaluate the 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 benefit testing, such as virtualisation, data mocking, contract testing, and automated integration testing techniques. Determine tools and approaches for automated test data management, test results aggregation and release management, enabling precise, real-time reports of automation test runs and roll-up reports.
• Manage test infrastructure usage and determine approaches to run distributed, parallel tests. Use container and cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests while optimising costs.
• Work with teams to promote the 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. You should be able to use concepts like thread management, synchronisation, resource and memory management to increase efficiency, and be able to use scripting languages like Bash or PowerShell (Lead essential criteria).
• Using and implementing tools like Selenium, RestAssured, Serenity BDD (or similar), build tools like Maven or Gradle, and code management tools like Git.
• Using and implementing unit test frameworks like JUnit, assertion libraries, data serialization 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 orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Using and implementing POM test design pattern and SOLID code design principles. Implementing coding guidelines and standards with an understanding of protocols and architectural styles in tests.
• Ability to engage with performance testing engineers and work with them to identify performance bottlenecks. Ability to read, interpret and articulate performance reports.

• 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.

Learn more about our benefits: Benefits - Home Office Careers

Additional Information

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.

Application

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