Location
London Borough of Croydon

Hours
Full Time - Compressed hours available

Salary
£62,732 - £69,006 (National) / £66,732 - £73,406 (London)

About the Role
Are you passionate about quality and driven to make a real impact? Join the award-winning Home Office Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) Team, one of the largest quality engineering functions in government with over 750 QA professionals. You will work at the forefront of modern engineering practices, shaping and advancing quality approaches within complex DevOps environments, including cloud-based platforms and services.

As a Lead Test Engineer, you will decide and drive the test engineering approach within your programme area, implementing strategies to assure, measure, and build quality into every phase of the software development life cycle. You will define product-level test engineering strategies for large scale or complex projects, ensuring alignment with portfolio-level approaches and QAT principles. You will contribute actively to portfolio-level Test Architecture.

Your responsibilities include solving engineering challenges related to QAT approaches, developing new frameworks, and enhancing existing ones to deliver scalable solutions. You will lead and coach a team of test engineers, promote convergence and shared capabilities, and embrace innovation by evaluating and recommending tools and approaches for automation, virtualization, contract testing, test data management, and release management.

You will manage test infrastructure, orchestrate distributed and parallel tests using container and cloud technologies, and promote the use of code scan, code quality, accessibility testing, and observability tools. You will participate in the QAT Test Engineering community and recruitment activities to help the team grow.

This role supports critical digital services that protect and serve the UK, including portfolios such as Police and Public Protection Technology, Homeland Security Group, and Home Office Biometrics. Some roles may offer a combination of office and home-based working, with a minimum of 60% office presence required.

Experience
Proven experience programming in Java to write secure, reusable, and maintainable automated tests and utilities, including thread management, synchronization, resource, and memory management. Experience with scripting languages such as Bash or PowerShell.
Experience using and implementing tools like Selenium, RestAssured, Serenity BDD (or similar), Maven or Gradle, and git.
Experience with unit test frameworks such as JUnit, assertion libraries, data serialization tools, and automated accessibility testing following standards like WCAG.
Extensive use of CI/CD tools for pipeline automation and understanding of release pipeline concepts.
Familiarity with containerization platforms like Docker and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
Experience implementing POM test design patterns and SOLID code design principles.
Ability to implement coding guidelines and standards, with a solid understanding of protocols and architectural styles.
Ability to collaborate with performance testing engineers to identify bottlenecks and interpret performance reports.

About you
Strong leadership and coaching skills to guide a team of test engineers and solve technical challenges.
Innovative mindset with the ability to evaluate and recommend new tools and approaches.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work within a large, diverse team.
Committed to continuous improvement and quality excellence.
Ability to manage test infrastructure and optimize testing processes using modern cloud and container technologies.

Qualifications
Knowledge of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework and Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) framework is desirable.
Essential skills aligned with SFIA levels: Strategic Planning (Level 4), Domain Experience (Level 4), Test, Analysis, Design and Execution (Level 3), Automation and Tooling (Level 4), Performance Testing (Level 4), Integration and Assurance (Level 3).
Behaviours assessed include Communicating and Influencing, Changing and Improving, and Making Effective Decisions.