Senior Software Development Engineer in Test


Company:	Government Recruitment Service
Salary:	£44,241 to £44,241 a year
Hours:	Full-time
Location:	Bristol
Job type:	Permanent
Posting date:	4 Sept 2026
Closing date:	15 Sept 2026

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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

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.

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