Senior Test Engineer
| Posting date: | 25 July 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £44,720 to £52,130 per year |
| Additional salary information: | New entrants to the Civil Service will start their role on the salary band minimum: £44,720 for National Roles. £47,850 for London Roles. You may be eligible for an additional non-pensionable allowance, pending a Capability and Skills Assessment, with a |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 06 August 2025 |
| Location: | London |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 418279/3 |
Summary
The Quality Assurance and Test (QAT) function in the Home Office is one of the largest in the industry, involving circa 850+ specialists. We use new technology, platforms and ways of working to help development teams meet user needs and make the delivery of services even better. Joining our team will mean you are well positioned to help shape the future, providing a balanced and data-driven approach to Quality Assurance to best support the effective delivery of Home Office goals.
As a Senior Test Engineer, you will adopt an engineering approach to achieving quality. You will be involved in assuring, measuring, and building quality into every phase of the software development life cycle. In doing so, you will seek to implement product level Test Engineering approaches which are in line with the portfolio Test engineering approach and QAT Test Engineering principles.
You will be involved in solving engineering challenges of QAT approaches adopted in projects that you work with. This involves developing and running scalable tests and processes that are faster, frequent, and continuous. You will be expected to build relationships with Software engineering, DevOps, Product and Project delivery partners to help make sure QAT is embedded by default into the development approach.
You will seek guidance and support from other members of the Test Engineering community to help develop your own technical and delivery management skills.
You’ll lead the test engineering strategy for your product area, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle. You’ll define and implement test approaches that align with portfolio-wide standards and Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) principles.
You’ll be responsible for ensuring quality is built in from the start—measuring, assuring, and continuously improving it at every stage. You’ll stay current with emerging tools and techniques, evaluating their potential to enhance delivery outcomes.
This role also involves mentoring others and actively contributing to the QAT Test Engineering community. You’ll champion the value of quality assurance across the wider GDaD profession, helping to shape a culture of excellence.
Quality Engineering Tools and Technologies we use:
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: Serenity BDD (Selenium + RestAssured), and several bespoke frameworks.
- DevOps: AWS, Jenkins, Drone, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform.
- Performance testing: JMeter.
- Other tools: Browserstack, Axe, ZAP, SonarQube.
- Observability and Monitoring: ELK, Grafana, Dynatrace.
What you will do
Your main day to day responsibilities will be:
- Actively maintain existing test frameworks or help develop new ones when required. You will also undertake code refactoring where necessary.
- Develop tests that are predictable, repeatable and implement automated verification of acceptance criteria to the greatest possible extent. Review test automation code and test utility code, and configure, monitor, and trigger tests to run on demand as well as continuously evaluating the efficacy of this process.
- Determine tools and approaches for virtualisation, data mocking , contract testing or other automated integration testing techniques and determine tools and approaches for automated test data management, test results aggregation and release management. Enable precise, real-time reports of automation test runs.
- Manage test infrastructure usage and determine approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Use container & Cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests.
- Interpret data from code scan, code quality and observability tools. Agree quality thresholds and provide actionable feedback in aiding quality improvement.
- Participate in the QAT Test Engineering community to help grow it.
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