Senior Software Development Engineer in Test - Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency - SEO
Government Digital & Data -
Location
Location: Bristol, Swansea, Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, Oldham (Chadderton), Birmingham(Garretts Green) or Uxbridge.
You can be based at any of the above locations, however if your chosen location is Yeading/Uxbridge please note:
This role is advertised as being based in Uxbridge; however, the contractual base will be Yeading.
While estate works are being carried out at the Yeading site, all roles will be temporarily located in Uxbridge. Successful applicants will therefore begin their employment at the Uxbridge location.
Please be aware that all employees will be required to work from the Yeading site once it reopens in 2028.
Employees based at Uxbridge will receive a London Weighting allowance of £4,000. This allowance will continue when the location moves to Yeading.
About the job
Job summary
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.
Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:
- Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
- 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday
- Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.
Read more in the Benefits section below!
Find out more about what it's like working at Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency - Department for Transport Careers
Job description
Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:
- 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.
For further information on the role, please read the attached role profile. Please note that the role profile is for information purposes only - whilst all elements are relevant to the role, they may not all be assessed during the recruitment process. This job advert will detail exactly what will be assessed during the recruitment process.
Person specification
To be successful in this role you will need to have the following experience:
- 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.
Additional Information
Government Digital & Data Allowance
The role is part of the Government Digital and Data (or Government Security Profession Career Framework) profession and utilises an enhanced Capability–Based Pay Framework which provides access to a Digital and Data allowance.
The base pay is £44,241. In addition to this the role includes a Digital and Data allowance of up to £14,552.
The value of allowance awarded will be based on an assessment of your skills and experience as demonstrated through the selection process. Here are more details on the pay framework.
