On behalf of DWP, we are looking for a Test Engineer for a 12 month (Inside IR35) contract based Hybrid in Newcastle.
Core Purpose
Join DWP’s Digital Payment Services team on a major, multi-year transformation programme modernising one of the UK’s largest and most critical payment platforms. As the UK’s biggest payer, supporting over 22 million citizens and processing approximately £230 billion in payments annually, this programme is re-platforming core systems to improve resilience, scalability and future innovation across government services.
As part of an Agile delivery team, you will support the delivery of applications across AME Payments, contributing to the reliability and performance of critical citizen-facing services.
As a Test Engineer, your main responsibilities will be to:
- Test applications that underpin critical citizen services, ensuring usability, accessibility, security, stability and performance.
- Build, enhance and maintain robust automated test frameworks and test suites within modern engineering and CI/CD environments.
- Identify, log and support resolution of defects impacting delivery.
- Define test coverage using a risk-based testing approach ensuring stability and reliability.
- Create and maintain test documentation within automation codebases.
- Collaborate with engineers and delivery teams across the software development lifecycle to ensure alignment.
Essential:
- Strong automation testing experience, with the ability to demonstrate depth of knowledge across frameworks, tooling and testing approaches.
- Experience writing automated tests using JavaScript, ideally within Node.js-based test frameworks (Java also accepted).
- Hands-on experience with Selenium WebDriver and Cucumber (BDD).
- Experience working in multi-disciplinary Agile teams with a solid understanding of Agile principles, methodology and tools.
- Ability to design and execute end-to-end automated test solutions.
Desirable:
- Exposure to event-driven architectures, including tools such as Kafka or similar messaging/event platforms.
- Experience using Node.js for test development (not just testing Node applications).
- Experience working within microservices-based architectures and distributed systems.
- Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitLab).
- Exposure to cloud environments (AWS) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform).
- Experience with tools such as Cypress, K6, REST API testing and Pactum.
Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.
Disability Confident
As a member of the Disability Confident Scheme, DWP guarantees to interview all candidates who have a disability and who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of candidates who have a disability who meet all the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. This scheme encourages candidates with a disability and/or neurodivergence to apply. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.
Armed Forces Covenant
DWP guarantees to interview veterans or spouses / partners of military personnel who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of ex-military candidates / military spouses or partners, who meet all of the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.
In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following "this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different".
