Senior Legacy Software Engineer (£45,900 to £57,400)

Government Recruitment Service; Swansea; On-site; GBP 46,000 - 57,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension contribution 28.97%

25 days annual leave (+1 per year)

Flexible working options

Job summary

DVLA is recruiting a Senior Legacy Software Engineer to maintain and evolve the Vehicle System Software (VSS), the UK’s vehicle system of record. You will own technical challenges, drive stability and performance, and mentor the team to raise engineering standards.

Join a department delivering critical services to millions of customers, with benefits including generous pension, leave, and flexible working options.

Qualifications

• Experience maintaining and evolving complex legacy software systems.
• Mentoring and supporting engineers to improve practices.
• Strong analytical skills and ability to troubleshoot in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead investigation and resolution of complex issues across the VSS estate.
• Develop, maintain and support software across client/server, batch and web services.
• Deliver technical changes and improvements with cross‑functional teams.
• Identify opportunities to improve resilience, performance and maintainability.
• Mentor engineers and promote engineering best practices across the team.

Job description

Senior Legacy Software Engineer (£45,900 to £57,400)

Would you like to play a leading role in maintaining and evolving one of DVLA's most critical business systems?

We're looking for a Senior Legacy Software Engineer to help shape the future of Vehicle System Software (VSS), the UK's vehicle system of record. You'll use your technical expertise to support and enhance a complex application estate, while helping to improve service performance, resilience and engineering practices.

This is an exciting opportunity to work with specialised technologies, influence technical decisions, mentor other engineers and contribute to the delivery of services that support millions of customers every day.

Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:

• Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
• 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday
• Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.

Read more in the Benefits section below!

Find out more about what it's like working at DVLA – Home | Civil Service Careers.

We are looking for a Senior Legacy Software Engineer to join the team responsible for Vehicle System Software (VSS), the UK's vehicle system of record containing information on more than 48 million vehicles.

VSS underpins many of DVLA's critical services and includes client/server applications, overnight batch processing and web services integrated with numerous internal and external systems.

As a senior engineer, you will take ownership of technical challenges across the VSS estate, supporting the stability and performance of existing services whilst helping to deliver enhancements and improvements. You'll work closely with architects, engineers and delivery teams to develop solutions that meet user and business needs.

Alongside hands‑on engineering, you'll play an important role in developing team capability by mentoring colleagues, sharing knowledge and promoting engineering best practice. You'll also contribute to improving the robustness, resilience and long‑term sustainability of our legacy estate as we continue our technology transformation journey.

We are recruiting at both Senior Executive Officer (SEO) and Higher Executive Officer (HEO) grades.

Responsibilities

Your responsibilities will include but will not be limited to:

• Leading the investigation and resolution of complex application and service issues, undertaking root cause analysis and implementing sustainable solutions.
• Developing, maintaining and supporting software across the VSS estate, including client/server, batch and service-based components, and working with relational databases to support service and business outcomes.
• Delivering technical changes and improvements, ranging from service enhancements to larger-scale project work, working collaboratively with architecture, engineering and operational teams.
• Identifying and implementing opportunities to improve system resilience, performance, maintainability and operational efficiency, contributing to continuous improvement and engineering best practice.
• Supporting and mentoring engineers, sharing technical knowledge and helping to build capability across the team.

Great line management is important to us as an organisation, and we will equip and support line managers to develop the skills set out in the Civil Service Line Management Standards.

For further information on the role, please read the attached role profile. Please note that the role profile is for information purposes only - whilst all elements are relevant to the role, they may not all be assessed during the recruitment process. This job advert will detail exactly what will be assessed during the recruitment process.

Would you like to find out more about the role, the team and what it’s like to work in our department? If so, we are organising an open session where you can virtually ‘meet the team’ on 25th November at 12:00pm.

Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme