Job Description:

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 Timeor Part Time

Closing Date: Sunday 28th June 2026

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
• 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.

Job description

Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:

1. Leading the design and development of test frameworks and tools.
2. Building reliable automated checks across API, integration, contract and end-to-end levels.
3. Improving CI/CD pipeline confidence through effective automated validation.
4. Investigating complex failures across code, environments, data and pipelines.
5. Supporting live service reliability by identifying risks and driving improvements.
6. Working with developers, testers, analysts and DevOps engineers to embed quality early.
7. Mentoring colleagues and promoting consistent quality engineering practices.
8. 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.

Behaviours

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

• Working Together
• Making Effective Decisions

Technical skills

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

• 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

To Apply

If you feel you are a suitable candidate and would like to work for DVSA, please click apply to be redirected to our website to complete your application.