Automation Test Engineer at ByDesign Secure, London, £500 per day

Opening: Join the Mission

We deliver secure, mission‑critical platforms and services for government and regulated organisation’s operating in high‑assurance environments. Our teams work at the intersection of cloud engineering, DevSecOps, and platform enablement, helping organisation’s adopt Google Distributed Cloud (air‑gapped GCP).

This role offers the opportunity to shape automation‑first testing strategies for new cloud‑native platforms, influence tooling and quality standards, and ensure solutions are secure, resilient, compliant, and testable by design.

Role Purpose

As an Automation Test Engineer, you will be responsible for designing, building, and operating automated testing capabilities across platform and application delivery teams.

You will:

• Define and implement test automation strategies aligned to IaC, CI/CD, and DevSecOps practices
• Select, evaluate, and trade‑off test tooling suitable for air‑gapped Google Distributed Cloud environments
• Build and maintain automated test suites, frameworks, and reporting
• Embed testing into continuous delivery pipelines, ensuring quality and security are validated early and continuously
• Work closely with platform engineers, developers, security specialists, and architects to ensure testability, quality, traceability and compliance are built into the platform from the outset.

About the Opportunity

Test Strategy & Tooling

• Define an automation‑first test strategy covering platform, infrastructure, and application layers
• Identify, evaluate, and document test automation tools appropriate for:
• Air‑gapped GDC environment
• Infrastructure‑as‑Code and Kubernetes‑based platforms
• Secure, regulated delivery environments
• Make informed tooling trade‑offs balancing capability, supportability, security accreditation, and maintainability
• Contribute to test standards, patterns, and reference implementations

Test Automation Engineering

• Design and develop automated tests across multiple levels, including:
• Unit and component tests
• Integration and system tests
• Infrastructure and configuration validation tests
• Smoke, regression, and deployment verification tests
• Build and maintain test automation frameworks using industry‑standard languages and libraries
• Engineer tests as code, ensuring they are versioned, reusable, and maintainable

CI/CD & DevSecOps Integration

• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, enabling:
• Continuous testing on code and IaC changes
• Automated quality gates and failure feedback
• Secure, repeatable validation of deployments
• Work with DevSecOps engineers to embed:
• Security testing (where appropriate)
• Policy and configuration validation
• Evidence generation for audit and assurance

Infrastructure & Platform Testing

• Validate Infrastructure‑as‑Code using automated testing and policy‑as‑code approaches
• Test Kubernetes‑based platforms (including GKE / GDC variants), focusing on:
• Configuration correctness
• Resilience and availability
• Upgrade and rollback scenarios
• Support platform teams by building reusable test capabilities that enable application teams to self‑serve quality assurance

Reporting, Assurance & Collaboration

• Produce automated test reports and dashboards for teams and stakeholders
• Provide clear, actionable feedback on failures and risks
• Participate in design and refinement sessions to ensure testability and quality are considered early
• Support defect triage, root‑cause analysis, and continuous improvement
• Contribute to documentation and knowledge sharing across teams

What You’ll Bring

Essential Experience

• Strong experience as an Automation Test Engineer / Software Test Engineer in Test
• Proven experience building automated tests in cloud‑native or containerised environments
• Hands‑on experience integrating test automation into CI/CD pipelines
• Solid understanding of DevOps and DevSecOps principles
• Experience working in secure, regulated, or government environments

Automation & Test Engineering Skills

• Proficiency in one or more test automation languages (e.g. Python, Java, Go)
• Experience with test frameworks and libraries such as:
• API: REST, pytest, Postman/Newman
• UI test tools e.g. Playwright, Selenium
• Strong understanding of test pyramid, shift‑left testing, and continuous testing

Cloud, Platform & IaC Knowledge

• Experience testing systems built on cloud platforms, ideally GCP
• Desirable: knowledge of Google Distributed Cloud or similar air‑gapped / on‑prem cloud solutions
• Experience with Kubernetes and containerised workloads
• Understanding of Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform)
• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (e.g. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)

Security & Quality Mindset

• Understanding of secure software delivery and quality assurance in high‑assurance environments
• Awareness of:
• Configuration drift
• Misconfiguration risks
• Compliance and audit evidence needs
• Ability to design tests that support assurance, resilience, and operational confidence

Bonus Points For

• Experience testing platform services (CI/CD platforms, shared cloud services)
• Experience with policy‑as‑code and configuration validation
• Exposure to performance and resilience testing
• Google Cloud or testing‑related certifications
• Experience working in air‑gapped or restricted networks
• Existing UK Government Security Clearance (SC or above)

Clearance Requirements:

• This role requires either an existing Security Clearance (SC level) or for one to be passed before commencement. There must be a willingness to undergo Developed Vetting (DV).

Job Types: Temporary, Fixed term contract (Outside of IR35)

Job Types: Fixed term contract, Temporary
Contract length: 12 months

Pay: £500.00 per day

Application question(s):

• Do you hold UK nationality? (Required due to client security restrictions)
• Do you currently hold active UK SC clearance?
• Are you eligible and willing to undergo UK SC/DV clearance for this role? (Applications without this cannot be considered)
• Does your delivery approach allow for on-site presence in London when required (typically around 3 days per week)?

Work Location: Hybrid remote in London