We are looking for people who are passionate about Quality. Do you want to be part of the award-winning Home Office Quality Assurance and Testing Team (QAT) within Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT)?
Quality is at the heart of everything we do. We provide a large-scale shared service, delivered through 750 QA professionals. It supports services that are essential for the UK!
A strong continuous improvement culture underpins the way we work, making advancements on how quality is delivered and assured in groundbreaking DevOps environments, including cloud platforms. We are a well-established, well-knit team of quality specialists and among the best in the industry!
We won the Testing Team of the Year at the 2024 European Software Testing Awards and were also re-certified at TMMi level 5, receiving the best score globally.
We are hosting an QAT online recruitment event on 6th February 2025 12:00 - 13:00, where you can find out more about our roles, working for the organisation and how to apply. Register your interest for the online event .
These jobs are in the Home Office Police and Public Protection Technology (PPPT) and His Majesty’s Passport Office ( HMPO) business areas.
PPPT is an organisation of dedicated professionals who are primarily responsible for the design, build and deployment of national law enforcement systems, ensuring that they are highly effective, efficient systems which leverage modern digital technologies and provide world-class law enforcement capabilities. DDaT is making significant investments in building and scaling modern cloud platforms to host these systems. PPPT is also responsible for the running and sustainment of critical national infrastructure such as the Police National Computer (PNC), as well as a myriad of other existing national policing systems.
HMPO supports citizens and protect borders. HMPO delivers world-class customer services, issuing over 6 million UK passports annually and ensuring their reputation as one of the most secure travel documents in the world. As part of HMPO, the General Register Office (GRO) oversees civil registration across England and Wales, including births, marriages, and deaths, in collaboration with local authorities and government partners. Together, we handle millions of vital records and provide essential public services with integrity and dedication.
As a Senior Test Engineer, you will drive the test engineering approach within your product area. You will determine and implement approaches to assure, measure and build quality into every phase of the software development life cycle. You will define and implement product level test engineering strategies while ensuring that these are aligned to portfolio level Test Engineering approaches and follow QAT Test Engineering principles.
You will be responsible for solving engineering challenges of QAT approaches adopted in projects that you work with. This involves developing or enhancing frameworks that help deliver scalable tests which are faster, frequent, and continuous. You will be expected to build relationships with Software engineering, DevOps, Product and Project delivery partners.
You will provide support and guidance to a team of engineers, further developing your own delivery management and leadership skills.
To help the QAT practice thrive, you will also keep up to date with emerging tools and approaches and work out how these could help the organisation to deliver better success. You will be an active contributor and a mentor within the QAT Test Engineering community. You will also promote the value of QAT within the larger Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession community.
Quality Engineering Tools and Technologies we use:
We have a wide portfolio of projects, and our vast estate covers a whole range of tools. The below is sample snapshot of some tools we use:
* Frameworks: Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), and several bespoke frameworks.
* DevOps: AWS, Jenkins, Drone, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform.
* Performance testing: JMeter.
* Other tools: Browserstack, Axe, ZAP, SonarQube.
* Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Dynatrace.
What you will do
Your main day to day responsibilities will be:
* actively maintain existing test frameworks or help develop new ones when required. You will also undertake code refactoring where necessary.
* develop tests that are predictable, repeatable and implement automated verification of acceptance criteria to the greatest possible extent. Review test automation code and test utility code, and configure, monitor, and trigger tests to run on demand as well as continuously evaluating the efficacy of this process.
* determine tools and approaches for virtualisation, data mocking, contract testing or other automated integration testing techniques and determine tools and approaches for automated test data management, test results aggregation and release management. Enable precise, real-time reports of automation test runs.
* manage test infrastructure usage and determine approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Use container & Cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests.
* interpret data from code scan, code quality and observability tools. Agree quality thresholds and provide actionable feedback in aiding quality improvement.
* participate in the QAT Test Engineering community to help grow it.
Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme
Disability Confident
About Disability Confident
A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. For more details please go to Disability Confident .