Lead Test Engineer

We are looking for people who are passionate about Quality to join the award-winning Home Office Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) Team within Home Office Digital. As part of our Automation and Innovation portfolio, you will work on mission-critical services that protect the UK’s borders, transform immigration and asylum systems, and strengthen Counter-Terrorism capabilities. This is an opportunity to develop and assure technology that helps reunite families, protect vulnerable people, create safer communities, and improve journeys for millions of people travelling to and from the UK.

Working alongside highly regarded, multidisciplinary teams, you will use your technical, delivery, and leadership skills to drive outstanding, industry-standard quality engineering practices that deliver real, everyday impact at national scale.

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:
  Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Rest Assured and several bespoke frameworks.
• Platforms and Pipelines:
  Power Apps, Dynamics, Azure, AWS, Git Hub Actions, Drone, Concourse, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform.
• Performance testing – Locust, JMeter.
• Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Dynatrace.

• Ownership of existing test frameworks and actively reviewing them, identifying need for new frameworks, and delivering these at scale.
• Leading and coaching a team of test engineers and analyst and solving 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.
• Embracing innovation - evaluating tools and recommending approaches that can benefit testing. For instance, ones used for virtualisation, data mocking, contract testing or other automated integration testing techniques, and determining 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.
• Managing test infrastructure usage and determining approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Using container and cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests while optimiser costs.
• Working with teams to promote use of 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.

• Skilled in designing and implementing Playwright‑based quality engineering frameworks, and in developing and maintaining Node.js packages to support automation tooling.
• Developing and scaling automated quality engineering solutions for Power Apps (model-driven and canvas apps), implanting 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 on Azure stack and a solid understanding of release pipeline concepts. Familiarity with containerization platforms like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Using and implementing
  
  POM test design pattern and SOLID code design principle. Implementing coding guidelines and standards with a solid understanding of protocols and architectural styles involved in implementing tests.
• Ability to actively engage with performance testing engineers and work alongside them to identify performance bottlenecks. Ability to read, interpret, and articulate performance reports.

Your CV and Personal Statement will both be assessed. Your Personal Statement should clearly evidence your experience against the essential skills, using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Make full use of the word count to create a comprehensive and compelling application. STAR -

Useful support on Home Office recruitment process including:
Success Profiles tips video, Personal Statement tips, Video/Interview tips video -

Information on the Pay Framework Allowance (PFA) -

Discover more about our work by watching this DDaT video

Please note - 3+ years UK residency is typically required to be eligible for SC Clearance and unfortunately we cannot offer sponsorship.