Lead Test Engineer - Drive Quality in Government Tech

Government Digital & Data; Croydon, Salford, Sheffield; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Home Office Digital designs, builds and develops services that support government operations. A Lead Test Engineer role focuses on defining test engineering strategies, building scalable quality practices, and ensuring quality across complex software lifecycles.

You will lead and mentor QA professionals, advance testing techniques, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, secure digital services for millions of users.

Qualifications

• Proficiency in Java to write secure, maintainable automated tests and utilities.
• Experience with Selenium, RestAssured, and Serenity BDD in test automation.
• Familiar with Maven or Gradle and Git for build and version control.
• Hands-on with unit testing frameworks (JUnit) and security best practices (OWASP Top 10).
• Strong CI/CD knowledge and experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
• Knowledge of test design patterns (POM) and SOLID principles.
• Ability to analyze performance tests and read performance reports.

Responsibilities

• 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 helping solve 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 deciding tools and approaches for automated test data management, test results aggregation and release management. Enabling precise, real-time reports of automation test runs and also roll‑up reports.
• Managing test infrastructure usage and deciding approach to running distributed, parallel tests. Using container & cloud technology to orchestrate faster, scalable tests while optimising 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 it grow.

Skills

Java

Selenium

RestAssured

Serenity BDD

Maven/Gradle

Git

JUnit

OWASP Top 10

WCAG

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

POM design

SOLID

Performance testing

Tools

Selenium

RestAssured

Serenity BDD

Maven

Gradle

Git

JUnit

OWASP

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Home Office Digital designs, builds and develops services that support government operations. A Lead Test Engineer role focuses on defining test engineering strategies, building scalable quality practices, and ensuring quality across complex software lifecycles.

You will lead and mentor QA professionals, advance testing techniques, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver reliable, secure digital services for millions of users.