Test Automation Engineer (Playwright / .NET)

The community

You will be part of a supportive engineering community, working with developers, product managers, user researchers, designers, business analysts and delivery managers to embed quality into digital services.

We champion continuous learning, open communication and agile ways of working. We believe in building quality into our products, systems and services, and that quality is everyone's responsibility.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain end-to-end, API and component test suites in Playwright for .NET (C#) against services built on ASP.NET Core.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps), with parallel runs, clear reporting and reliable results on every pull request.
• Work with developers to shift testing left: testable designs, test-first conversations at refinement, and unit and integration coverage in the codebase.
• Keep the automated suite trusted by driving down flaky tests and making run times and failure rates visible to the team.
• Implement contract testing (Pact) to protect integrations between services and teams.
• Build accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) and cross-browser checks into the automated suite, in line with the GOV.UK Service Standard.
• Contribute to the test strategy and assurance evidence needed for service assessments and go-live decisions.
• Highlight testing risks and dependencies early, and communicate them clearly to the team and stakeholders.
• Share automation practice with testers and developers across the organisation, and contribute to our quality engineering standards.

If this feels like an exciting challenge and something you are enthusiastic about, please read on and apply!

Specifications

Essential

• Proven experience building and maintaining test automation for web applications, including hands-on Playwright experience.
• Strong C# and .NET skills: able to read production code, write clean maintainable test code and review others' pull requests.
• Experience automating REST APIs as well as the browser, with a clear view of where each test belongs in the test pyramid.
• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and handling parallelism, retries, reporting and environment setup.
• Working knowledge of Git and modern branching workflows.
• Understanding of functional and non-functional testing techniques and when to apply them.
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Ability to communicate test results and risk clearly to technical and non-technical colleagues.
• Eligible to work in the UK and to obtain BPSS clearance.

Desirable

• Contract testing with Pact or similar.
• Experience with cloud-based test environments, for example Azure, AWS, Docker or Kubernetes.
• Accessibility testing tools such as axe or Pa11y.
• Performance testing tools such as k6 or JMeter.
• Experience on UK government digital services and the GDS Service Standard.
• Playwright in TypeScript alongside .NET.
• Current SC clearance.