Lead Test Engineer


Company:	Government Recruitment Service
Salary:	£75,026 to £90,267 a year
Hours:	Full-time
Location:	NE98 1YX
Job type:	Permanent
Posting date:	15 Sept 2026
Closing date:	27 Sept 2026

Apply for this job

Summary

Do you want to shape the quality of services that support millions of citizens?

Ready to lead testing across large scale digital transformation programmes while developing and supporting a high performing engineering community?

If so, come and join us as a Lead Test Engineer.

Debt Solutions is responsible for DWP's Debt Management, Compensation Recovery and Debt Management Information Systems. These critical services are used by thousands of colleagues and customers, helping to recover around £3 billion in debt each year while supporting and protecting some of the most vulnerable people in society.

We're delivering ambitious transformation programmes to replace legacy debt management platforms with modern, cloud first technologies and commercial off the shelf solutions, while continuing to operate and enhance our existing mission critical services.

You will provide strategic leadership for testing across the entire Debt Solutions portfolio. Leading a community of around 25 Test and QA Engineers, supported by Senior Test Engineers, you will define and implement testing strategies, promote best practice, and drive quality across multidisciplinary delivery teams.

You'll play a key role in ensuring the reliability, performance and quality of products and digital services that deliver real value to citizens, while helping to shape the future direction of test engineering within Debt Solutions.

Work with, influence and drive collaboration with key stakeholders and technical decision makers across disciplines to define a strategic testing/quality vision and influence products and services.
Enable the identification of skills gaps within the team, capability building and support recruitment and retaining of talent into the organisation within Debt Solutions.
Drive adoption of risk and context based approaches to Agile and Waterfall testing techniques, principles, and tools.
Ensure that usability, accessibility, security, stability, performance and quality is embedded in the development of our services, in a consistent and standardised way.
Lead the team to build appropriate engineered repeatable tests and contribute to the value automation adds to quality solutions.
Promote engagement with continuous integration, delivery and deployment practices following standards and tooling methodologies
Proactively share knowledge, solutions, tooling and support our internal communities along with mentoring, coaching, and supporting your peers and line manage Senior Test Engineers.
Work with our technology stack which includes commercial-off-the-shelf products (e.g. DM6 debt system), Java/node.js microservices, Postgres/MongoDB databases, Azure cloud infrastructure, Gitlab CI/CD pipelines, PowerBI/Business Objects.

Apply for this job

Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme

About Disability Confident

Disability Confident is a government scheme. It encourages employers to recruit and retain disabled people and those with long term health conditions.