UCAS is at the heart of connecting people to higher education.

UCAS is the world’s leading shared admissions service for higher education. We provide application services for UK universities and colleges as well as delivering a wide range of research, consultancy and advisory services to schools, colleges, careers services, professional bodies and employers.

We’re a successful and fast-growing organisation, which helps hundreds of thousands of people every year. We're committed to delivering a first-class service to all of our customers — they're at the heart of everything we do.

Digital and Data

The Digital and Data business unit defines and delivers the digital products and services used by students, providers, advisers, and commercial partners, as well as the underlying technology platforms that enable these products to be developed in a responsive and agile way.

Through the development and support of our underpinning data platform the business unit ensures that our data is curated and made available for use both by our analytical reporting and our data products and insights teams.

Working in multi-disciplinary teams comprising customer insight, product managers, architects, developers, testers and data scientists, the Digital and Data business unit ensures that UCAS is a customer centric, product-focused digital business, connecting students with their next opportunity.

The Test Automation Architect is a crucial role within the Product Engineering team and will be accountable for the implementation and adoption of the test automation strategy within UCAS.

Reporting to the QA and Test Team Lead you will be working closely with peers across the department in order to drive a consistent and efficient approach to the automated test assurance of UCAS’ products and services, orchestrated by the CI/CD pipeline. This would include coaching and mentoring of Test Engineers who wish to learn automation techniques. The tech stack varies across each of the product development teams, with key technologies including .Net, AWS, Java, Angular, Salesforce and React Native.

Key accountabilities:

·Provide technical leadership and innovation whilst accountable for the development of quality, complex and scalable automated solutions
·Identify testing tools and processes that align with the technologies already in place along with the skill set of the team
·Responsible for defining and maintaining a roadmap for the implementation of the automation strategy aligned to the test pyramid model
·Monitor, mentor and collaborate in order to continually improve the use of automation techniques across the department.
· Lead Engineers, distributed across many Agile delivery teams, through all aspects of automation testing ensuring that quality is embedded as early as possible, with a goal of achieving fast feedback, as part of the UCAS agile Development Lifecycle

·Strong knowledge and experience of various test automation tools and best practices.

·Experience in collaborating and influencing cross-functional teams.

·Knowledge of Agile principles.

·Significant experience with test automation assessment, strategy and management.

·Broad and extensive experience of creating and developing automation frameworks, owning the research into tooling and identifying opportunities to carry out a proof of concept and following that up by defining standards to be applied.

·Ability to identify how to increase efficiency of tests and reduce the cost of quality.

·Experience of working within an Agile development environment.

·Ability to influence a community of engineers of the importance of investing time into testing and maintaining an automation test suite.

·A confident communicator, both verbal and written, comfortable with engaging with customers at all levels, both technical and non-technical.

·A fail fast mentality – you will be actively encouraged to trial new test technology and practices.

·Ability to mentor and grow capacity.

·Experience with implementing Contract Testing would be beneficial.

·5+ years experience in a similar role.

Salary - up to £60,000

• 30(!)days annual leave (plus 3 concessionary days over Christmas and your bank holidays!)

• Flexibility – UCAS positively supports Hybrid working for its employees, meaning you can work between home and the office in a way that suits you and the business and also has a comprehensive Flexible Working Policy

• A generous pension scheme

• Hundreds of high street discounts and offers with Perkbox

• Internal training and development

• Subsidised gym and café

• Be rewarded for going above and beyond with our ex-gratia bonus scheme and Celebrating U, our quarterly employee recognition scheme