Full-time (Permanent) £57946 - £78205 per annum + plus 28.97% employer pension contributions
Manchester Published on 27 February 2026 Deadline 13 March 2026
As a Senior Test Engineer you'll join DWP Digital's Universal Credit & Working Age team - the people who design, build and run services relied on by over 5 million claimants and 30,000 colleagues. You'll set the direction for automated testing across teams so we can ship secure, stable and accessible services at pace and with confidence.
This role blends deep technical knowledge with coaching and leadership. You'll be guiding Test Engineers across squads, championing great engineering practice and fostering a supportive, collaborative culture. You'll define automation strategies, build test frameworks for APIs and UIs, embed quality through CI/CD and help teams take a smart, risk‑based approach that focuses effort where it matters most.
This is a high‑impact role where your judgement and technical leadership will directly improve outcomes for people across the country.
What skills, knowledge and experience will you need?
* You're confident using Java to build, extend and maintain automated tests.
* You've built and looked after API test automation (for example with Rest Assured or similar) and know how to validate contracts and edge cases.
* UI testing. You've created reliable UI test automation (for example with Selenium, Playwright or Cypress) and understand how to keep it stable and fast.
* You work with CI/CD. Using tools like GitLab CI or Jenkins to run tests in pipelines and keep quality visible for the team.
* You've enabled performance (e.g. k6, Gatling, JMeter), security, compatibility and accessibility testing so services are robust for real users.
* Experience with multiple test automation frameworks and know how to choose the right approach for the problem.
You and your role
As our Senior Test Engineer you will be the technical voice for testing across several agile delivery teams working on Universal Credit and Working Age services. You'll set clear testing strategies, standardise patterns and help teams design for testability from the start so we catch issues early and release value quickly.
You'll build and evolve automation across the stack, which includes:
* Designing API and UI frameworks that are fast, maintainable and aligned with engineering standards.
* Embedding tests in CI/CD so quality gates run early and often.
* Using a risk‑based approach to focus testing where it reduces uncertainty the most.
* Ensuring accessibility, security, stability and capacity are considered throughout the lifecycle, not bolted on.
Equally important is your coaching and leadership. You'll mentor Test Engineers, pair with developers, and nurture communities of practice - raising capability, sharing patterns and improving tooling together. You'll lead by influence, bring clarity to complex problems, and help teams make smart trade‑offs that protect live services while enabling rapid improvement.
You'll thrive here if you enjoy hands‑on engineering, care about people and practice, and want to see your work make a measurable difference for citizens across the UK.
Location: You'll join us in one of our brilliant digital hub/s in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester or Newcastle, whichever is most convenient for you.
Hybrid Working: We work a hybrid model - you'll spend some time working at home and some time collaborating face to face in a hub.
Pay: We offer competitive pay of £57,946 to £68,205 plus up to £10,000 Digital Allowance subject to our assessment of your capability at interview
Pension: You'll get a brilliant civil service pension with employer contributions worth 28.97%, worth up to £X per year.
Holidays: A generous leave package starting at 26 days rising to 31 days over time.
You can also take up to 3 extra days off a month on flexi-time. You'll also get all the usual public holidays.
Process
We know your time is valuable so our application and selection process is just two stages:
Apply today!
Coding test: to be completed remotely
Interview: a single stage interview online, which would include executing coding problems.
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