Lead Test Engineer - Home Office - G7

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

Location

Croydon, Salford, Sheffield

About the job

Job summary

Are you passionate about quality and driven to make a real impact? We are looking for talented quality professionals to join the award‑winning Home Office Quality Assurance and Testing (QAT) Team. Quality is at the heart of everything we do. As one of the largest quality engineering functions in government, our shared service is delivered through a community of over 750 QA professionals, supporting critical digital services that help protect and serve the UK. Our strong culture of continuous improvement drives innovation in the way quality is delivered and assured. Working at the forefront of modern engineering practices, you'll help shape and advance quality approaches within complex DevOps environments, including cloud‑based platforms and services.

You'll be joining a highly skilled, collaborative, and supportive team of quality specialists that is recognised as one of the best in the industry. Whether you are looking to deepen your technical expertise, lead quality transformation, or contribute to nationally important services, you'll find exciting opportunities to grow and make a difference.

These roles are available across a number of high‑profile portfolios, including:

• Police and Public Protection Technology (PPPT)
• Homeland Security Group
• Home Office Biometrics

If you're passionate about quality engineering and want to help deliver services that matter to millions of people, we'd love to hear from you.

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 short video to hear from members of Home Office Digital talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here: Working for Home Office Digital.

Job description

Home Office Digital designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Every year our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, up to 8 million passport applications and deliver 140 million police checks on people, vehicles and property.

As a Lead Test Engineer, you will decide and drive the test engineering approach within your programme area. You will decide and implement approaches to assure, measure and build quality into every phase of the software development life cycle. You will define and implement product level test engineering strategies in large scale or complex projects while ensuring that these are aligned to portfolio level Test Engineering approaches and follow QAT Test Engineering principles. You will also be actively contributing to portfolio level Test Architecture.

You will be responsible for solving engineering challenges of QAT approaches adopted in projects that you directly work with or are consulted for. This involves developing new frameworks, reviewing, and enhancing existing frameworks to help deliver scalable solutions.

Person specification

Main 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.

Working Pattern

Due to the business requirements of this role, it is only available on a full‑time basis. However, compressed hours are available.

Essential Skills

• Programming using Java to write secure, reusable, and maintainable automated tests and test utilities. You should be able to use concepts like thread management, synchronisation, resource, and memory management to increase the efficiency of test engineering solutions and be able to use scripting languages like Bash or PowerShell (Lead essential criteria).
• Using and implementing tools like Selenium, RestAssured, Serenity BDD (or similar), build tools like Maven or Gradle, code management tools like git.
• Using and implementing unit test frameworks like JUnit, assertion libraries, data serialisation tools, security best practices like OWASP Top 10 and standards such as WCAG to design automated accessibility tests.
• Extensively using CI/CD tools for pipeline automation and a solid understanding of release pipeline concepts. Familiarity with containerization platforms like Docker and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
• Using and implementing POM test design pattern and SOLID code design principle.
• Implementing coding guidelines and standards with a solid understanding of protocols and architectural styles involved in implementing tests.
• Ability to actively engage with performance testing engineers and work alongside them to identify performance bottlenecks. Ability to read, interpret and articulate performance reports.