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.
Home Office Police and Public Protection Technology (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.
As a Lead Test Engineer, you will determine and drive the test engineering approach within your programme 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 in large scale or complex projects while ensuring that these are aligned to portfolio level Test Engineering approaches and follow QAT Test Engineering principles. You will also be actively contributing to portfolio level Test Architecture.
You will be responsible for solving engineering challenges of QAT approaches adopted in projects that you directly work with or are consulted for. This involves developing new frameworks, reviewing, and enhancing existing frameworks to help deliver scalable solutions. You will be expected to build relationships across other Home Office Government Digital and Data professions and work with senior business stakeholders, understanding their needs and translating them into a test engineering approach. You will lead a team of engineers including coaching and mentorship to develop individuals and the wider Test Engineering community.
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 are keen for Engineers to continue learning new technologies, we have a large range in the Home Office including:
* Cloud: AWS (primary) and Azure.
* Test Frameworks: Terrattest, Pytest, Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), Playwright, and several bespoke frameworks.
* DevOps: AWS LZA, GitLab, Jenkins, Drone, Concourse, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform.
* Performance testing: Locust, JMeter.
* Other tools: AWS FIS, Chekov, ZAP, SonarQube.
* Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace.
What you will do
Your main day to day responsibilities will be:
* working within a cloud platform setting, especially one focussed on AWS. You will be setting the overall direction for the team’s test engineering approach while developing and implementing innovative approaches for the portfolio’s strategic cloud platform, encompassing DevSecOps best practices.
* leading and coaching a team of test engineers and helping solve technical challenges that the team may require assistance with, evaluating efficacy of test engineering processes across projects and suggesting improvements. Promoting convergence, creating shared capabilities and data driven approaches within test engineering.
* partnering with engineering and senior delivery partners to make sure Infrastructure as Code test engineering frameworks are embedded by default in the engineering approach, implementing all levels of a modern test pyramid that map to a modern CI/CD pipeline.
* managing test infrastructure usage and determining approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Using container & cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests while optimising costs.
* working with teams to promote use of AWS best practices on security, IAM, ingress/egress, account workloads, code scan, code quality, accessibility testing and observability tools.
* participating in the QAT Test Engineering community as well as QAT recruitment 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 .