Principal Test Engineer - Cloud Platforms
| Posting date: | 03 December 2024 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £73,900 to £73,900 per year |
| Additional salary information: | New entrants to the Civil Service will start their role on the pay range minimum: £73,900 for national roles, £77,900 for London roles. You may be eligible for an additional non-pensionable allowance, pending a Capability and Skills Assessment, with a val |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 16 December 2024 |
| Location: | Manchester |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 380909/2 |
Summary
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 recently won the Testing Team of the Year at the 2024 European Software Testing Awards and were also re-certified at TMMi level 5 earlier this year, receiving the best score globally.
This role will lead our Test Engineering team within our strategic platform, Core Cloud. The Core Cloud team is responsible for building a new strategic hosting platform using Amazon Web Services. We are taking a product-centric approach and are building squads around our products, with a focus on improving Developer Experience at the Home Office.
As the Principal Test Engineer for our strategic cloud platform, you’ll be critical to delivering test engineering and assurance and maturing the quality of our cloud platform engineering practice. This 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 that field.
You will set the direction for Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) and develop and implement QAT approaches. You will be responsible for ensuring we have the right test engineering teams in place across the platform and will collaborate with engineering and delivery partners to make sure QAT is embedded by default into the development approach. To help the QAT practice thrive, you will call on your expertise in emerging tools and approaches and apply these to help the organisation deliver better success.
You will be part of the leadership team leading the overall Test Engineering practice across the organisation, promoting quality outcomes and value. You will provide leadership and guidance to a team of engineers, further developing your own test engineering, delivery management and leadership skills.
You will work with senior engineering and business stakeholders, understanding their needs and translating them into a QAT approach, driven by engineering at its core. You will also work with development teams to embed QAT within the overall development approach and with industry partners to leverage the best of new and emerging tools and approaches. Within the DDaT community, you will take a lead in sharing, collaborating and promoting the value of QAT.
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:
- 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, Drone, Concourse, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, 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:
- working within a cloud platform setting, especially one focussed on AWS. You will be setting the overall direction for QAT engineering and developing and implementing innovative approaches for our strategic cloud platform, encompassing DevSecOps best practices
- 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
- building, mentoring and leading quality engineering teams by providing support and guidance to more junior members and providing technical advice on improving the way we do things
- building and delivering quality engineering solutions that are scalable, efficient, and cost effective
- quantifying, measuring, and reporting on code quality and using risk-based approaches to decision making
- making the QAT practice thrive by exploiting new and emerging tools and approaches and using these to help the organisation deliver better services
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