26.64 HEO Test Engineer

Job summary

DBS was established under the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 on 1 December 2012, operating from two sites, Liverpool and Darlington. We operate on behalf of government delivering Disclosure functions in England, Wales, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, and Barring functions for England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We operate in the complex world of safeguarding alongside our multi agency partners. Safeguarding means protecting people’s health, wellbeing and human rights, and enabling them to live free from harm, abuse and neglect.

We provide a service that enables organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors to make better informed, safer recruitment and other decisions. We do this by providing information to enable them to determine whether individuals are unsuitable or unable to undertake certain work, particularly with occupations involving regular contact with vulnerable groups, including children.

The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) has an ambitious strategy and as part of this we are embarking on a significant transformation programme – changing the way we deliver services to our customers, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our end to end service, providing digital channels and implementing changes that support Government strategy.

As part of this the DBS Test teams role is to provide a QAT function for our internal delivery teams to ensure that projects which are delivered have the correct level of test assurance, assuring of third party supplier test teams deliverables and supporting internal deliveries.

Job description

A Test Engineer will work within the Technology and Innovation Directorate under the Senior Test Engineer in:

• Implementing the Test Strategy and researching new technology and new techniques
• Seeking and adopting continuous improvement
• Providing assurance of internal and external delivery

Main responsibilities of the role would include:

Technical

• Identify and manage problems, incidents, risks and issues
• Build automated tests to support our continuous deployment environments using the technology of choice
• Responsible for test case design and execution of manual test cases
• Contribute to the design, coding, testing and documentation of small scale to large, complex or mission critical programs
• Responsible for ensuring that the team test and build activities follow agreed governance and processes

Behavioural

• Understanding yourself to be a leader (and the impact of your behaviour on others in a project team focused on results)
• Engaging Stakeholders (for mutually beneficial collaborative relationships outside of the team)
• Work across several multi-disciplinary teams to deliver highly focused and successful digital services
• Highly driven & inspires others to move things along and make things happen

Personal and Team Development

• Take responsibility for your own training and development
• Continuously improves technical knowledge and stays abreast of latest trends
• Shares knowledge of tools and techniques with your wider team and the business stakeholders

Corporate Duties

• Representing DBS / Technology and Innovation Directorate at appropriate forums, as directed.
• Supporting the delivery of the Technology and Innovation Directorates objectives i.e. business plan.
• Work as part of a wider directorate, bringing together skills and expertise into a single, coherent and enabling directorate.

Person specification

Technical Skills and Experience

Essential

• Experience of working as a Test Engineer
• Has been a key player in delivering technical solutions as part of large projects
• Excellent understanding of a mainstream automation testing framework such as Selenium / NightwatchJS / Cucumber
• Experience in web services, REST
• Experienced with modern delivery models such as Scrum and Agile
• Has an understanding of architectural principals such as SOA and Micro-Services

Desirable

• Experience with Automation tools, such as Copado, MS Visual Studio with C#, Selenium, BDD-Cucumber, SpecFlow, NUnit and Rest-Assured
• Experience with API Performance Testing – JMeter/Postman
• Experience with End to End automation – Serenity / Selenium-Web driver
• Experience with Accessibility Testing
• Experience with Git

Relevant Training and Qualifications

Essential:

• ISTQB CTFL-AT (Certified Tester Foundation Level Agile Tester) or equivalent

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Making Effective Decisions
• Working Together
• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Implementation and maintenance of Automated Test Framework

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £36,444, Disclosure & Barring Service contributes £10,557 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The DBS offers a number of excellent benefits for its employees. These can include:

• Generous annual leave entitlement
• Excellent maternity, paternity and adoption schemes (after a qualifying period)
• Commitment to the health and wellbeing of our employees
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Flexible working opportunities
• Eyecare voucher scheme
• Occupational Health Service including referrals for counselling and physiotherapy
• 24/7 Counselling and Wellbeing Service
• A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%

The DBS vision and purpose is to make people safer by being a visible, trusted and influential organisation, providing an outstanding quality of service to all our customers and partners, where our people understand the important safeguarding contributions they make and feel proud to work here. To do this, the DBS is committed to being an employer that is able to attract, develop, retain and engage diverse talent that is representative of the communities we serve, and to be an organisation providing outstanding service to all our existing and new customers, who are diverse and have a range of different needs. We want all our staff to be able to bring their ‘whole self’ to work.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

To apply for this post, please provide a CV together with a suitability statement of no more than 500 words, outlining how your skills and experience meet the requirements of the role, including all essential and desirable criteria. You will also be asked to provide a 250-word statement displaying your knowledge and understanding of implementing and maintaining automated test frameworks and incorporating these with a deployment tool such as Jenkins.

For all candidates who are successful at the initial sifting stage, you will be invited to a panel based interview that will assess the following behaviours:

• Making Effective Decisions
• Working Together
• Changing and Improving
• Delivering at Pace

The interview will also assess the following technical skill:

• Implementation and maintenance of Automated Test Framework

The following timetable outlines indicative dates. Please note, these dates may be subject to change without prior notice.

The closing date for applications is 8th June 2026 at 10:00am.

The initial candidate sift is due to take place week commencing 8th June 2026.

Interview dates will be confirmed at a later date.

Interview will be held virtually via Microsoft Teams. Whilst we will endeavour to provide some flexibility with regards to dates wherever possible, it is unlikely that we will be able to offer an alternative date once an appointment has been scheduled.

Further Information:

**This role requires SC level security clearance**

You must meet the security requirements before you can be appointed.

For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, the expectation of UK residency for SC clearance is 5 years continuous presence in the UK. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers.

To view the DBS Recruitment and On-boarding Privacy Notice, please click the link below:

DBS Recruitment and On-boarding Privacy Notice - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : DBS People Support Team
• Email : DBSPeopleSupportTeam@dbs.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : DBSPeopleSupportTeam@dbs.gov.uk

Attachments

DBS Job Description - HEO Test Engineer v1 Opens in new window (docx, 361kB)