Senior Test Engineer - SC Cleared at Department for Work & Pensions, UK Office/Remote, 9 Months, £Contract Rate

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions, and child maintenance policy. As the UK’s biggest public service department, it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers. As such, we operate on a scale that is almost unmatched anywhere in Europe and most people in Britain come into contact with us at some point in their lives.

Working with DWP, you will be helping us to drive our priorities to:

• Help people to move into work and support those already in work to progress, with the aim of increasing overall workforce participation
• Help people to plan and save for later life, while providing a safety net for those who need it now
• Provide effective, efficient, and innovative services to the millions of claimants who rely on us every day, including the most vulnerable in society
• Improve experience of our services while maximising value for money for the taxpayer.

DWP  is building a centralized Management Information (MI) platform to aggregate, transform, and securely deliver enterprise data from legacy on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. As a Senior Test Engineer, you will lead the strategic quality assurance framework for this mission-critical ecosystem. You will spearhead testing across hybrid environments, ranging from on-premises Oracle and Informatica data warehouses to near to real-time, cloud-hosted AWS streaming pipelines.

As a Senior Test Engineer your main responsibilities will be:

• Strategic Test Leadership: Define and implement risk-based, shift-left testing strategies that align with business priorities, technical architecture, and strict delivery timelines.
• Pipeline Automation & Engineering: Build, maintain, and execute end-to-end testing frameworks within GitLab CI/CD pipelines to guarantee delivery confidence.
• Comprehensive Quality Assurance: Direct multi-layered testing initiatives covering infrastructure automation, end-to-end data pipelines, data quality, and rapid smoke testing.
• Security & Verification Compliance: Validate robust data encryption/decryption routines, SFTP transfer integrity, and secure certificate storage configurations using HashiCorp Vault.
• Stakeholder & Supplier Engagement: Collaborate closely with Product, Business, and delivery teams, while managing testing governance across internal squads and external supplier organisations.
• Mentorship & Innovation: Coach and mentor test engineers across programmes, driving continuous improvement and exploring cutting-edge testing toolsets.

Essential:

• An active SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be willing & eligible to undergo checks. (Please note, due to the exceptional requirements of this position (short-term nature of this role and speed at which we require a postholder in situ) preference may be given to candidates who meet all of the essential criteria and hold active security clearance.) 
• Hands-on proficiency with Python, PySpark, SQL, and PL/SQL for data validation and test automation scripts.
• Experience testing hybrid architectures, including Oracle data warehouses, Informatica workflows, Apache Kafka, and AWS EMR.
• Practical understanding of cloud security protocols, including OAuth/Cognito authentication, cryptographic keys, and HashiCorp Vault.
• Competency in utilising operational observability tools like AWS CloudWatch to track data pipeline performance and anomalies.
• A hands-on, authoritative QA leader with a platform-engineering mindset who confidently guides technical teams and influences architectural choices.
• Highly structured problem solver who relies on data, metrics, and risk-based decision-making to balance delivery speed with platform stability.
• Skilled at translating complex, low-level technical or data issues into clear, actionable insights for senior business and product stakeholders.

Desirable:

• Experience verifying data accuracy, semantic model freshness, and downstream presentation directly within Power BI dashboards.
• Familiarity with verifying the performance and security boundary parameters of Microsoft Data Gateways.
• Exposure to evaluating or implementing AI-assisted testing solutions to optimise pipeline delivery velocity.
• Public Sector experience.