Lead Test Engineer - Department for Work and Pensions - G6

Location

This role may be located in one of the following locations; Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield.

Please find further information on the Corporate hub locations here.

Please note:

For candidates requesting to work in Newcastle, the role will initially be based at Benton Park View. It will then move to 1 Pilgrim Place in Newcastle city centre by the end of 2027.

For candidates requesting to work in Sheffield King’s Court, please note these roles will initially be based at King’s Court and then move to 1 West Bar by early 2028.

As part of the role, you may be required to travel regularly to the other digital hubs. The frequency of this will be discussed further should you be successful.

About the job

Job summary

Do you want to shape the quality of services that support millions of citizens?

Ready to lead testing across large scale digital transformation programmes while developing and supporting a high performing engineering community?

If so, come and join us as a Lead Test Engineer.

Debt Solutions is responsible for DWP's Debt Management, Compensation Recovery and Debt Management Information Systems. These critical services are used by thousands of colleagues and customers, helping to recover around £3 billion in debt each year while supporting and protecting some of the most vulnerable people in society.

We're delivering ambitious transformation programmes to replace legacy debt management platforms with modern, cloud first technologies and commercial off the shelf solutions, while continuing to operate and enhance our existing mission critical services.

You will provide strategic leadership for testing across the entire Debt Solutions portfolio. Leading a community of around 25 Test and QA Engineers, supported by Senior Test Engineers, you will define and implement testing strategies, promote best practice, and drive quality across multidisciplinary delivery teams.

You'll play a key role in ensuring the reliability, performance and quality of products and digital services that deliver real value to citizens, while helping to shape the future direction of test engineering within Debt Solutions.

Job description

• Work with, influence and drive collaboration with key stakeholders and technical decision makers across disciplines to define a strategic testing/quality vision and influence products and services.
• Enable the identification of skills gaps within the team, capability building and support recruitment and retaining of talent into the organisation within Debt Solutions.
• Drive adoption of risk and context based approaches to Agile and Waterfall testing techniques, principles, and tools.
• Ensure that usability, accessibility, security, stability, performance and quality is embedded in the development of our services, in a consistent and standardised way.
• Lead the team to build appropriate engineered repeatable tests and contribute to the value automation adds to quality solutions.
• Promote engagement with continuous integration, delivery and deployment practices following standards and tooling methodologies
• Proactively share knowledge, solutions, tooling and support our internal communities along with mentoring, coaching, and supporting your peers and line manage Senior Test Engineers.
• Work with our technology stack which includes commercial-off-the-shelf products (e.g. DM6 debt system), Java/node.js microservices, Postgres/MongoDB databases, Azure cloud infrastructure, Gitlab CI/CD pipelines, PowerBI/Business Objects.

Person specification

When completing your CV, please provide clear evidence of your extensive experience, strategic leadership and measurable achievements against the essential criteria listed below:

• Lead Criterion - Leading and proactively owning test/quality strategies across multiple teams and tech stacks and types such as Microservices, API’s, GUI’s, CoTs and message brokers.
• Proactively defining and embedding Test Engineering practices in Java especially around BDD.
• Leading and enabling non-functional testing approaches (e.g. accessibility, performance, security, usability), including test types, tools and appropriate standards.
• Driving and implementing of shifting testing earlier, including CI/CD, and use of automated pipelines within cloud infrastructure.
• Leading, developing and line managing agile and diverse teams of embedded test Engineers, promoting skills development, good practices and continuous improvement.
• Providing technical leadership across the full software development lifecycle, from understanding business needs to delivery into production. Delivering technical leadership and managing risk, issues, defects, reporting progress.

If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact Richard.hanley@dwp.gov.uk.