Senior Software Development Engineer in Test
Location: Swansea, Bristol, Nottingham, Birmingham, Yeading (Hayes), Oldham, Newcastle, Leeds
Salary: £44,241 per annum
Vacancy Type: Permanent, Full Time or Part Time
Closing Date: Sunday 28th June 2026
Overview
The Strategy, Policy, Digital & Technology Directorate plays a central role in delivering DVSA’s digital services that support road safety and compliance across the UK. The Test Engineering team sits within this directorate and is responsible for ensuring high-quality, reliable, and scalable digital products. Working closely with product, delivery, and engineering teams, the group embeds quality from the outset of development, balancing manual and automated testing to provide confidence in delivery. The team drives improvements in testing practices, builds reusable frameworks, and promotes a culture of collaboration, early engagement, and continuous improvement to meet both user needs and DVSA’s strategic goals.
Benefits
- Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary
- 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday
- Flexible working options encouraging a great work-life balance
Responsibilities
- Leading the design and development of test frameworks and tools.
- Building reliable automated checks across API, integration, contract and end-to-end levels.
- Improving CI/CD pipeline confidence through effective automated validation.
- Investigating complex failures across code, environments, data and pipelines.
- Supporting live service reliability by identifying risks and driving improvements.
- Working with developers, testers, analysts and DevOps engineers to embed quality early.
- Mentoring colleagues and promoting consistent quality engineering practices.
- Contributing to engineering standards, continuous improvement and cross-team collaboration.
Great line management is important to us as an organisation, and we will equip and support line managers to develop the skills they need. We aim to empower line managers to create teams where people can flourish and deliver excellent outcomes for the public.
Person Specification
- Designing and developing test frameworks and tooling.
- Writing clean, reusable and maintainable code in a modern engineering environment.
- Testing across API, integration, contract and end-to-end levels.
- Working with CI/CD pipelines and automated quality checks.
- Investigating complex failures across systems, environments, data and pipelines.
- Working in Agile, multidisciplinary teams to deliver digital services.
- Applying quality engineering practices to improve reliability and scalability.
- Mentoring others and influencing consistent engineering and testing standards.
Behaviours
- Working Together
- Making Effective Decisions
Technical Skills
- Developer – Modern Development Standards – Level: Practitioner
- Developer – Systems Integration – Level: Practitioner
- Developer – Service Support – Level: Practitioner
- Developer – Development Process Optimisation – Level: Working
- Senior Developer – Programming and Build – Level: Practitioner
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