QA Test Infrastructure Engineer, Cheltenham

QA Test Infrastructure Engineer - Chelmsford, Onsite - Outside IR35 - Highest Security Clearance

As a QA Test Infrastructure Engineer, you'll help design, build, and deliver secure digital solutions in highly secure environments. You'll work alongside engineers, architects, and delivery specialists to develop technology that enables faster, safer decision‑making for critical operations.

Role includes:

• Ensuring quality of products as they move from prototype/proof of concept into Production.
• Analyse infrastructure requirements and architectures; identify test conditions; maintain traceability; log risks.
• Create infrastructure‑focused test strategies and plans defining scope, environments, tooling, automation, and governance entry/exit criteria.
• Provision and validate test environments in collaboration with DevSecOps, ensuring OS, network, platform services, monitoring, and pipelines align to readiness standards.
• Design and execute tests across physical infrastructure and IaC, including functional, integration, regression, resilience, non‑functional, and security‑related scenarios.
• Apply Secure‑by‑Design principles; support security testing; contribute to accreditation, assurance, and compliance documentation.

Key Responsibilities Required

Infrastructure, Networking & Operating Systems:

• Strong understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, routing, switching, firewalls, VLANs, and related network behaviours.
• Experience with physical infrastructure setup and troubleshooting (routers, switches, cabling).
• Proficiency with Linux/Unix command line for diagnostics, configuration, and validation.
• Experience working across virtualisation platforms (VMware, VirtualBox) and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

• Terraform: writing/validating HCL, managing state, using modules.
• Ansible: building playbooks/roles, inventories, and validating idempotency.
• Kubernetes: deploying workloads, validating manifests, managing clusters, and testing containerised applications.

CI/CD & Automation

• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
• Experience integrating IaC validation and environment checks into automated pipelines.
• Understanding of pipeline gating, automated readiness checks, and environment orchestration.

Security & Compliance

• Strong grounding in Secure‑by‑Design principles, IAM, least privilege, OS hardening, network segmentation, and observability.
• Experience within regulated or highly governed environments (eg, MOD or similar).
• Ability to support compliance, assurance, and accreditation activity.

Due to the nature of the organisation applicants are required to hold the Highest Level of Security Clearance.

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