DevOps Test Automation Engineer

We are supporting a secure central government programme looking for an experienced DevOps Test Automation Engineer/SDET to join a highly technical, cloud-native engineering team.

This is not a conventional manual or functional testing role.

The team need an engineer who can bridge test automation, quality engineering and DevOps-someone comfortable writing Python, working inside CI/CD pipelines, validating AWS infrastructure and deployments, and testing APIs, microservices and event-driven systems.

The wider engineering environment includes Python, AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, CI/CD, APIs, microservices and distributed systems.

The role

You will design and implement automated quality controls throughout the software-development lifecycle, working closely with software engineers, DevOps/platform engineers and other technical specialists.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Designing and developing Python-based automation frameworks for API, integration, contract, service and web testing.
• Embedding automated tests, smoke checks and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Testing AWS-hosted applications, cloud-native services and infrastructure changes.
• Validating Terraform deployments, environment configuration and operational readiness.
• Testing APIs, microservices, messaging platforms and event-driven integrations.
• Working with containerised environments using Docker, Kubernetes and Amazon EKS.
• Performing API and contract testing using tools such as Postman, Pact and REST automation libraries.
• Testing asynchronous and distributed systems, including Kafka or AWS messaging services.
• Diagnosing failures across application code, pipelines, infrastructure, logs and environments.
• Supporting functional and non-functional testing across performance, security, resilience and reliability.

• Active UKSV SC or DV clearance.
• A current and verifiable AWS certification.
• Strong hands-on experience within AWS engineering environments.
• Commercial experience as an SDET, DevOps Test Engineer, Test Automation Engineer or cloud-focused Quality Engineer.
• Strong Python development and test-automation experience.
• Terraform or broader infrastructure-as-code experience.
• CI/CD pipeline experience using Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps or comparable tooling.
• Advanced API, integration and contract-testing experience.
• Experience testing microservices, distributed systems or event-driven architectures.
• Knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes and preferably Amazon EKS.
• Experience within a secure, regulated or complex public-sector environment.

Desirable experience

• Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Cucumber, Behave, SpecFlow or RestAssured.
• Pact contract testing.
• Kafka or comparable streaming and messaging technology.
• AWS Lambda, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, EC2, EKS, S3 or CloudWatch.
• Performance testing using JMeter.
• Ansible, JFrog and observability tooling.
• ISTQB, ISEB, CSTE or another relevant testing qualification.
• Previous central government, policing, defence or justice experience.

Important

This position will not suit someone whose recent experience is predominantly manual testing, UAT coordination or test management.

We need a technically hands-on engineer who can work across Python code, APIs, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, AWS infrastructure and automated testing.