Senior Research Officer CCAV
| Posting date: | 19 August 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £42,848 per year |
| Additional salary information: | National minimum - £42,848 London minimum - £47,052 |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 03 September 2025 |
| Location: | Leeds |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 415173/2 |
Summary
Can you apply your skills to inform the future of connected and automated vehicles?
If so, we are looking for a highly motivated researcher who can deliver high quality research, working professionally with colleagues and stakeholders.
This role is part of the Analysis, Enablers and Strategy (AES) division within the Future Transport Systems directorate. The AES division has over 25 people working across a range of roads policy areas. It’s a friendly team made up of social researchers, economists, statisticians, operational researchers, project delivery and policy professionals.
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 the Department for Transport:
- DfTc roles: Department for Transport Central - Department for Transport Careers
The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) is a government policy team which reports jointly to the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Department of Business and Trade (DBT) and aims to realise the benefits that connected and self-driving technologies can bring. These new technologies have the potential to contribute to a transport system that is safer, more responsive to user needs, more accessible, and more efficient. This role will join a great team of Analysts within CCAV to help deliver this exciting programme of work.
There is much we still don't know about self-driving vehicles and the impact they could have on transport users and society overall – this role is crucial in improving our understanding. In this role you will be designing and managing primary research, providing expert advice to policy officials, and supporting the passage of secondary legislation.
Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:
- Understanding public perceptions, awareness, knowledge and willingness to use self-driving vehicles and ways of improving these.
- Building evidence to support the development of standards and regulation.
- Understanding how needs vary across different people user groups and geographic areas (urban vs rural) to ensure that future transport systems are inclusive and support key government policies.
- Leading on the design, specification, commissioning, management and delivery of contracted research projects using a range of qualitative and quantitative methods including evaluations to inform policy priorities.
- Overseeing the delivery and publication of high-quality, accessible outputs from contractors.
- Scoping monitoring and evaluation designs for future policies.
- Help identify gaps in the current evidence base by engaging widely and getting the buy-in of policy partners, analytical colleagues and external stakeholders and develop proposals to fill them.
- Providing technical support and advice to policy colleagues on research methods, including advising on the relative robustness of competing sources of evidence and the interpretation of findings.
- Communicating and promoting research and evaluation findings across the department.
For further information on the role, please read the 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.
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