Overview

DWP Digital – Senior Performance Test Engineer

Location: Hybrid model available in Birmingham, Blackpool, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle or Sheffield. Salary up to £71,017 with pension contributions of 28.97% and flexible hours. Hybrid working and great work-life balance.

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Performance Test Engineer to join our community of tech experts in DWP Digital. We are using fresh ideas and leading-edge tech to build and maintain digital solutions used by nearly every person in the UK, every day. DWP is the UK's largest government department, helping people into work and making payments worth over £195bn a year.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance testing across key services in an agile team with a pragmatic, strategic mindset focused on system scalability and sustainability.
• Test performance of APIs, UIs, microservices and enterprise databases (e.g., MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle) and identify bottlenecks across application and infrastructure layers.
• Use performance testing tools (JMeter, K6) and monitoring tools (Grafana, Kibana, Kiali, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch); work with IaC and modern DevOps practices.
• Collaborate with developers and architects, participate in test automation and CI/CD integration; mentor others and help shape testing strategy.

Qualifications

• Significant demonstrable experience as a Performance Test Engineer or Lead in an agile environment with focus on scalability and sustainability.
• Experience with performance testing APIs, UIs, microservices and enterprise databases (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle).
• Strong ability to identify performance bottlenecks across application and infrastructure layers.
• Practical experience with JMeter and K6, and monitoring tools (Grafana, Kibana, Kiali, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch).
• Familiarity with IaC and modern DevOps practices.

Benefits

• Hybrid working, flexible hours, and generous leave (starting at 26 days rising to 31 days with service); up to 3 extra days off per month on flexi-time plus public holidays.
• Pension: employer contributions 28.97% (approximately £16,000 per year).
• Pay up to £71,017.
• Broad benefits: flexible working, volunteering, diversity programs, personal development, career progression, and more.