
Senior Software Development Engineer in Test
Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA)
Job description
📍 Location: Bristol, Swansea, Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, Oldham (Chadderton), Birmingham (Garretts Green) or Uxbridge (Hybrid)
💷 Salary: £44,241
Employees based at Uxbridge will receive a London Weighting allowance of £4,000. Plus an additional Government Digital and Data Profession allowance (non-pensionable) up to £14,552.
A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
🕒 Contract Type: Permanent – Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time
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 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.
Key Responsibilities include, but are not 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.
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 annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.
Being part of our brilliant Civil Service means you will have access to a wide range of fantastic benefits. This includes:
• A generous annual leave entitlement
• Attractive pension options with an employer contribution of 28.97%
• Flexible working
• Good career development opportunities
• A variety of career paths
• Inclusive working environments and much more to support a healthy work/life balance
About you
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.
📅 Apply before 11:55 pm on Tuesday 15th September 2026