Lead Test Engineer (Cloud Platforms) - HO - G7

Croydon CR0 2WF, Manchester M5 3LZ, Sheffield S3 8NU
(All QAT roles require flexibility of location, including working from supplier sites and other business locations across the UK and occasionally abroad).

The Home Office Quality Assurance and Testing Team (QAT) is seeking individuals passionate about quality and engineering excellence to join their well-established, award-winning team. QAT delivers a large-scale shared service through 750 QA professionals, supporting essential UK services and fostering a strong culture of continuous improvement, particularly in DevOps and cloud environments.

Recently recognised as Testing Team of the Year at the 2024 European Software Testing Awards and re-certified at TMMi level 5 with a global best score, the team prides itself on industry-leading quality standards. The Core Cloud team, a key part of Test Engineering, is building a new strategic hosting platform using Amazon Web Services, focusing on a product-centric approach and enhancing the developer experience at the Home Office.

This Lead Test Engineer role is central to the Core Cloud platform, contributing to advancements in quality assurance and testing within a dynamic, collaborative, and innovative environment.

Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office. Applicants can raise any queries to the email address at the bottom of the advert.

Watch this video to hear from members of the team talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here.

This role will particularly excite you if you are a quality engineering expert with a keen interest and experience in platform engineering, or equally if you are an experienced platform engineer with a keen interest in quality approaches in the field. You will deliver modern, effective test engineering and assurance, whilst maturing the quality of our cloud platform engineering practice.

You will be responsible for solving interesting engineering challenges, including building, adopting, and improving automated test frameworks to deliver effective feedback at scale and pace for complex platform capabilities covering both functional and non-functional aspects. It is essential to ensure these are aligned to the overall platform-level test approaches and QAT principles.

Collaboration is key in this role. You will work with engineering and delivery teams to make sure QAT is embedded by default into the development approach. Building healthy relationships with your team, the wider team, other Home Office Digital professions, and communicating effectively with senior business stakeholders will be crucial. To help the QAT practice thrive, you will also keep up to date with emerging tools and innovative quality approaches, applying them to improve engineering practice within the QAT Test Engineering community and the wider organisation, promoting quality outcomes and value.

QAT/Engineering Tools and Technologies we use:

We have a wide portfolio of tools across the programme including:

• Cloud: AWS (primary) and Azure
• Test Frameworks: Terrattest, Pytest, Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), Playwright, and several bespoke frameworks.
• DevOps: AWS LZA, GitHub and GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
• Performance testing - Locust, JMeter
• Other tools - AWS FIS, Checkov, ZAP, SonarQube
• Observability and Monitoring - ELK, Grafana, Prometheus, Dynatrace.

What you will do

Your main day to day responsibilities will be:

• Setting the direction for QAT Strategy and Test Engineering within the AWS-focused strategic cloud platform.
• Developing and implementing innovative tooling and DevSecOps best practices.
• Guiding, mentoring, and supporting engineers at all levels, including junior QAT engineers.
• Providing technical advice to improve engineering processes and practices.
• Embedding Infrastructure as Code test frameworks and implementing a modern test pyramid aligned with CI/CD pipelines.
• Building scalable, efficient, and cost-effective quality engineering solutions, while measuring code quality and using risk-based decision-making to help the QAT practice thrive through innovation.

Essential Criteria

As a Lead Test Engineer, you will have experience of:

• Collaborating with a wide variety of stakeholders to implement effective quality measures and mechanisms.
• Strong technical automation skills with the ability to write well-structured reusable maintainable tests and test utilities (Java, Python, TS/JS preferred).
• Leading a technical team of test engineers, this includes experience with DevSecOps, Cloud Platforms, Containers, Networking, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), SCM e.g. GitHub / Bitbucket.
• Design and deliver platform test approaches involving test automation environments, utilising virtualisation and containerisation.
• Experienced with DevSecOps environment including IaC testing, Unit testing, Contract testing, API testing, E2E testing, Resilience testing.
• Develop and enhance platform test engineering tools to support QA, Testing and Software Development in complex environments, with experience in AWS, Linux, AWS SDK, Pytest and TerraTest, CI/CD tools. eg. Jenkins/ GitHub Actions/ArgoCD.