Senior Performance Test Engineer - DWP - G7

Location: Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle-upon-Tyne or Sheffield. Please note that for candidates requesting to work in Newcastle, this role will be based at Benton Park View from September 2025, and then at 1 Pilgrim Place in Newcastle city centre by the end of 2027.

About The Job

Do you thrive on solving complex performance challenges in large-scale distributed systems? Are you passionate about using data to drive decisions and improve user experience? Want to make a real impact by ensuring the UK’s largest government department delivers seamless digital services? As a Senior Performance Test Engineer at DWP Digital, you’ll play a crucial role in building and assuring mission-critical applications used by millions of citizens and thousands of frontline staff. You’ll be part of a dynamic, agile delivery team, designing and implementing robust performance testing strategies that ensure our systems are scalable, resilient, and fast under pressure. This is more than just testing — it’s about engineering confidence into services that matter.

Key tasks include:

• Leading performance testing across Citizen Information projects, ensuring microservices are scalable and reliable under peak load.
• Designing, building, and maintaining performance test frameworks and automated test solutions.
• Collaborating with developers, architects, and operations teams to identify bottlenecks and deliver actionable insights.
• Integrating performance testing into CI/CD pipelines, enabling continuous quality assurance.
• Championing performance best practices and mentoring other engineers.

Security clearance is required for this role. For further information, please see the Selection process details.

Job Description

• Leading the design and implementation of performance testing strategy across systems and teams in Citizen Information, providing technical leadership and guidance.
• Leading delivery of performance testing activities, ensuring quality, time and cost objectives are met.
• Setting the strategic direction for product teams and the Performance Test Engineering community.
• Conducting performance testing of applications deployed on Kubernetes clusters in AWS, using tools such as JMeter and K6.
• Utilising Git CI/CD pipelines for integrating and automating performance tests in the development lifecycle.
• Defining the scope of performance testing by analysing non-functional requirements (NFRs) and collaborating with stakeholders to gather them.
• Building workload models, preparing and executing performance tests and analysing results for optimization.
• Monitoring system metrics during testing and ensuring accurate evaluation.
• Driving standardisation by sharing reusable frameworks and lessons learned with other DWP teams.
• Coordinating with teams to highlight dependencies, impacts and priorities.
• Developing performance testing approaches and reporting mechanisms agreed with senior stakeholders.
• Proficiency in different types of performance testing (load, soak, stress) with an understanding of scalability and disaster recovery testing.
• Strong analytical skills to interpret test results, raise defects, provide recommendations and take ownership.

Person specification

See selection process for details. For more information about the role, please contact richard.hanley@dwp.gov.uk.

Technical skills

• Non Functional - Testing

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Full-time

Job function

• Quality Assurance

Industries

• Technology, Information and Internet