A singularly perturbed Volterra integro-differential problem is considered. The variable two-step backward differentiation formula is used to approximate the first-order derivative term and the trapezoidal formula is used to discretize the integral term. Then, the stability and convergence analysis of the proposed numerical method are proved. It is shown that the proposed scheme is second-order uniformly convergent with respect to perturbation parameter $\epsilon$ in the discrete maximum norm. Finally, a numerical experiment verifies the theoretical results.