QA Engineer

As a valued employee of the British Council you already help us deliver our mission to support peace and prosperity by building connections understanding and trust between people in the UK and countries worldwide. For over 90 years we have shaped brighter futures through education arts culture language and creativity.

You are part of our organisation in over 200 countries and territories and where we are on the ground in more than 100 countries.

We connect. We inspire.

Job Title: QA Engineer

Purpose of job:

As a QA Engineer you will be a vital player in upholding the standard of quality within your team working collaboratively with fellow engineers and designers. Positioned within the heart of the QA Engineering community you contribute actively to the collective knowledge and best practices of this group.

Throughout the software engineering process youre engaged from the initial phases ensuring that the product or service not only meets but exceeds user expectations. With guidance from the Lead QA Engineer youll learn and immerse yourself in the entire software development journey from understanding user needs and requirements to verifying these requirements through comprehensive testing.

Working within multidisciplinary teams you will use your expanding expertise in the software development process to ensure it aligns with the teams approach methods and practices and complies with both internal and external governance standards.

With an increasing knowledge of software engineering and testing practices you will actively apply quality assurance principles and practices within your team. Youll focus on advocating for and employing software engineering best practices with a strong emphasis on automated testing to ensure quality is consistently prioritised throughout every project phase.

The purpose of your role will be to directly enhance the resilience efficiency and security of our digital work products. You will collaborate closely and openly with a diverse team composed of frontend and backend engineers product owners designers performance specialists and operations experts around the world. Together youll play a key role in shaping the success of the organisations digital future.

Role context:

The Digital and Technology Directorate leads the British Councils digital strategy and transformation. It creates and executes technology initiatives to fulfil the organisations mission and corporate priorities.

Key focus areas are:

• Creating digital products that attract and retain customers delivering business value through digital design and delivery expertise.
• Developing and optimising digital platforms that provide seamless customer interactions and use scalable and secure capabilities.
• Enhancing digital capability across the organisation.
• Enabling growth impact and efficiency through technology.

Digital and Technology is a global Directorate organised into four divisions: Product Engineering Operations and Performance which collectively create digital products and services maintain and improve products services and platforms and optimise performance. Areas of responsibility include digital and technology strategy architecture infrastructure software development data innovation and cybersecurity. It ensures that technology initiatives are customer and value focused accessible efficient and secure.

This role is an integral role in the Engineering unit. The Engineering team brings together capabilities which include Architecture Software Engineering QA and Delivery expertise to ensure excellence in the development of our global products and services. Encompassing Reuse Buy and Build strategies it champions community of practices define solutions and corecapabilities and create amazing products.

Main opportunities/challenges for this role

Accountabilities responsibilities and main duties:

QA Engineering & Collaboration

• Assist in maintaining quality standards for projects by providing support to team members.
• Engage with the QA community to learn about and adopt best practices.
• Support the implementation and adherence to quality standards and coding best practices.
• Support the culture of quality within the team and organisation by contributing to discussions and initiatives.
• Offer a quality assurance perspective in team discussions focusing on the practical application of engineering stories.

Product/Programme/Service Delivery

• Where necessary work with product leads to ensure quality in engineering stories.
• Support test team leads product leads and stakeholders by executing tests to maintain quality in engineering stories.
• Follow established test standards and methods to ensure software development projects meet acceptance criteria at all stages.
• Execute automated and manual tests ensuring products and services meet expected quality criteria.
• Assist in the maintenance of automated test scripts within the teams frameworks.
• Perform manual testing activities to maximise test coverage and identify defects that might be missed by automated tests.
• Help to integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines through collaborative efforts with engineering peers.
• Participate in TDD practices under the mentorship of more experienced team members.
• Use tools like JIRA for tracking defects and support effective communication regarding issues and their resolutions.
• Assist in the development of test plans and cases focusing on clear and executable strategies for both manual and automated tests.
• Stay informed about current testing tools methodologies and industry best practices to support continuous improvement in quality processes.

Risk & Compliance

• Support the identification of potential system risks and contribute to implementing security measures.
• Assist senior team members to ensure solutions meet industry standards regulations and data privacy requirements.
• Help to monitor and maintain tools for detecting and responding to any potential security or compliance issues.

Analysis & Reporting

• Work alongside the team to gain an understanding of product requirements and user needs.
• Support the process of reporting on quality metrics and test results and contribute to data and insights to inform the QA engineering team development team product leads and stakeholders.

Role specific knowledge and experience

Minimum/essential

• Experience in Quality Assurance with experience of both manual and automated testing in agile environments.
• Understanding of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and the role of QA.
• Experience of automation tools such as Selenium or and exposure to scripting in Java Python or JavaScript.
• An understanding of standard testing methodologies and events (e.g. Blackbox testing story testing regression testing).
• Knowledge of testing frameworks such as BDD tools and associated tools such as Cucumber.
• Basic knowledge of RESTful APIs.
• Awareness of relational database concepts and SQL and an ability to compose basic queries.
• An understanding of the concepts of CI/CD tools for test integration and automation.
• Experience in device and browser testing.
• Experience with raising defects in defect tracking tools such as JIRA.
• A practical grasp of fundamental web technologies such as HTML CSS JavaScript for the purposes debugging.
• Reliable written and oral communication skills to support the documentation of tests and reporting of defects.

Desirable

• Basic/beginner knowledge of cloud platforms for testing (e.g. AWS Azure).
• Understanding of security testing concepts and practices.
• Exposure to performance testing concepts and tools.
• Critical thinking and an eye for detail in the QA process.
• Exposure to best practices in software security testing.
• Familiarity with usability and user experience (UX) testing..
• Awareness of Azure DevOps tools especially Azure Test Plans through exposure or use
• Some exposure to automating web application tests using common tools or libraries in a test environment context
• Familiarity with basic application monitoring tools such as Application Insights and their importance in the QA/test process.
• Basic knowledge or some experience with relational database testing possibly with Azure SQL Database or similar.

Education:

Further Information

Pay Band 6

No. of openings 2

Contract Type Fixed Term Contract (till 31Mar2026

Department/Country Engineering & Development/ India Noida

Closing Date (Time) 25 Apr 2025 23:59 IST Time/ 18:29 UK Time

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Equality Diversity and Inclusion(EDI) Statement

The British Council is committed to policies and practices of equality diversity and inclusion across everything we do. We support all staff to make sure their behaviour is consistent with this commitment. We want to address under representation and encourage applicants from underrepresented groups in particular but not exclusively on grounds of ethnicity and disability. All disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria are guaranteed an interview and we have Disability Confident Employer Status. We welcome discussions about specific requirements or adjustments to enable participation and engagement in our work and activities.

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