Senior Performance Test Engineer - DWP - G7

Location

This role may be located in one of the following locations; Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne or Sheffield. Please find further information on the Corporate hub locations here.

Please note that for candidates requesting to work in Newcastle, this role will be based at Benton Park View from September 2025, and then at 1 Pilgrim Place in Newcastle city centre by the end of 2027.

About the job

Job summary

Do you thrive on solving complex performance challenges in large-scale distributed systems?

Are you passionate about using data to drive decisions and improve user experience?

Want to make a real impact by ensuring the UK’s largest government department delivers seamless digital services?

As a Senior Performance Test Engineer at DWP Digital, you’ll play a crucial role in building and assuring mission-critical applications used by millions of citizens and thousands of frontline staff. You’ll be part of a dynamic, agile delivery team, designing and implementing robust performance testing strategies that ensure our systems are scalable, resilient, and lightning-fast under pressure.

This is more than just testing — it’s about engineering confidence into services that matter.  Key tasks include:

• Leading performance testing across Citizen Information projects, ensuring microservices are scalable and reliable under peak load.
• Designing, building, and maintaining performance test frameworks and automated test solutions.
• Collaborating with developers, architects, and operations teams to identify bottlenecks and deliver actionable insights.
• Integrating performance testing into Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines, enabling continuous quality assurance.
• Championing performance best practices and mentor other engineers.

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.

Job description

The roles and responsibilities for this role include but are not restricted to the following:

• Leading the design and implementation of performance testing strategy across systems and teams in Citizen Information providing technical leadership and guidance
• Leading delivery of performance testing activities, ensuring that quality, time and cost objectives are met.
• Setting the strategic direction for product teams and the Performance Test Engineering community.
• Conducting performance testing of applications deployed on Kubernetes Cluster in AWS cloud using performance testing tools like JMeter, K6. 
• Utilising Git CI/CD pipelines for integrating and automating performance tests in an application development lifecycle.
• Defining the scope of performance testing by analysing non-functional requirements including technical architecture, deployment documents and collaborating with stakeholders to gather and understand NFRs.
• Building workload models, prepare and execute performance tests and analyse test results for performance optimization.
• Monitoring system metrics during testing and ensure accurate evaluation.
• Driving standardisation by sharing reusable frameworks, libraries and services, experience, and lessons learned with other DWP teams.
• Driving collaboration by aligning what teams are working on and highlighting the key dependencies, impacts and priorities.
• Developing appropriate performance test approaches and reporting mechanisms to be agreed with senior stakeholders. 
• A strong knowledge of performing different types of performance testing like load, soak, stress. Good understanding of scalability and disaster recovery testing.
• Strong analytical skills to interpret test results and provide actionable insights.  Raise defects, provide recommendations and take ownership.

Person specification

See selection process for further details.

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

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Non Functional - Testing