Description:
A senior quality leadership role responsible for defining and enforcing the organization's quality assurance strategy across all engineering streams. Owns test architecture, quality standards, automation direction, and release confidence, while building a high-performing AQA function that ensures scalable, reliable, and compliant software delivery.
Responsibilities:
- Drive high-quality strategy across products, platforms, and delivery streams.
- Establish automation as the default quality approach across UI, API, integration, regression, and non-functional testing.
- Drive adoption of AI-enabled quality engineering practices to improve efficiency, productivity, test coverage, and defect detection across the testing lifecycle.
- Own the quality engineering framework, including automation tooling, test architecture, CI/CD integration, reporting, and quality gates.
- Identify opportunities to leverage AI and intelligent tooling to optimise test coverage, improve root cause analysis, support risk-based testing, and reduce manual effort.
- Drive release confidence through measurable quality indicators, including defect leakage, automation coverage, flaky test reduction, execution stability, and production incident trends.
- Partner with Engineering, Product and Scrum to embed quality throughout the SDLC, from requirement refinement through production validation.
- Define and enforce test design standards, automation coding practices, maintainability principles, and quality gates across the AQA team.
- Lead the AQA team: standardise practices, establish reporting, and coach AQA capability.
- Own test environment readiness, test data strategy, and integration reliability required for consistent automated execution.
- Drive continuous improvement in quality processes, release readiness, defect prevention, root cause analysis, and feedback loops from production issues.
- Provide leadership reporting on quality health, delivery risk, release readiness, and productivity improvement opportunities.
- Support compliance and audit readiness by ensuring traceability between requirements, test coverage, defects, and release evidence.
Qualifications & Skills:
- Strong programming skills in Python
- Hands-on experience with Selenium WebDriver, BDD frameworks (Behave/Cucumber) and Allure TestOps
- Familiarity with technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, and relational/document data models.
- Strong understanding of CI/CD integration, test strategy, defect lifecycle management, and quality metrics.
- 10+ years in software quality assurance or quality engineering, with 3+ years in a lead, principal, or head-of-function role.
- Proven experience building and scaling automation frameworks and quality processes in high-concurrency, high-availability environments.
- Strong background in regulated, fast-paced environments such as Fintech, Payments, Crypto, Brokerage, or Trading.
- Strong understanding of BDD practices, Gherkin design, and maintainable step definitions
- Solid understanding of SDLC, release management, and quality governance.
- Deep understanding of modern software architectures, including microservices, distributed systems, APIs, and event-driven design.
- Hands-on experience defining automation strategy across frontend, backend, integration, and end-to-end testing.
- Experience introducing modern engineering tooling, including AI-assisted approaches, to improve efficiency and quality outcomes.
- Knowledge of performance, resilience, and reliability testing principles.
- Skilled in leadership reporting, stakeholder management, people development, and driving quality accountability across teams.
- Bachelor's/Master's degree preferred.
