You will act as the technical authority for quality engineering, establishing modern automated test frameworks from scratch, overseeing complex data and non-functional testing, and embedding continuous quality gates within modern CI/CD pipelines.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Leadership & Governance
Define Strategy: Set the strategic direction for test engineering across product teams, establishing robust, risk-based testing strategies and clear quality metrics.
Technical Guidance: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to embedded QA engineers, raising team capability and promoting engineering best practices.
Delivery Oversight: Lead testing activities across parallel workstreams, ensuring quality, time, and cost objectives are met.
Escalation & Defect Management: Act as the primary technical point of escalation for complex issues, environmental blockers, and risk management (RAID).
Stakeholder Alignment: Develop tailored test approaches and executive reporting mechanisms to gain alignment with senior business and technical stakeholders.Quality Engineering & Continuous Improvement
Framework Architecture: Design, build, and maintain scalable, reusable automation frameworks for UI, API, and backend data flows using modern languages (TypeScript, Python, Java, or C#).
Data & ETL Testing: Oversee end-to-end data testing strategies across complex, large-scale data environments, validating data transformations, schema integrity, and ETL pipelines (e.g., Informatica, Oracle, SQL).
Non-Functional Testing (NFT): Embed usability, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 standards), security, stability, and capacity testing early into the development lifecycle.
Tooling & Infrastructure: Select appropriate test technical tools, define test infrastructure approaches, and optimize execution times to reduce technical debt.
Standardisation & Collaboration: Drive standardisation by sharing reusable automation libraries across teams, aligning cross-team dependencies, and promoting a culture of experimentation.Key Competencies & Capability Profile
Problem Solving & Critical Thinking: Ability to investigate complex process problems, absorb large amounts of conflicting technical information, and formulate actionable recommendations.
Test Planning & Governance: Expert-level knowledge of system and acceptance test planning, coordinating both functional and non-functional specifications.
Non-Functional & Risk Management: Skilled in designing and executing non-functional testing techniques, evaluating risk profiles, and prioritizing defects based on severity.
Delivery Methodologies: Proficient in Agile/Scrum and BDD environments; adept at helping teams visualize outcomes, manage priorities, and deliver against Minimum Viable Products (MVPs).
Technical Landscape Mastery: Deep understanding of cloud environments (AWS/Azure), containerisation (Docker), microservices architecture, and modern digital technology boundaries.Essential & Desirable Criteria
Essential Requirements:
Clearance: Active UK Security Clearance (SC Cleared) or immediate eligibility for SC transfer.
Automation Expertise: Proven experience building UI and API automation frameworks from scratch using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, or Pytest.
ETL & Database Testing: Hands-on experience working in large-scale data environments, writing complex SQL queries, and validating data pipelines (experience with Informatica PowerCenter and Oracle databases).
CI/CD & Infrastructure: Experience integrating automated test suites into modern CI/CD deployment pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitLab CI, Jenkins, AWS).
Test Leadership: Demonstrated track record of mentoring QA engineers, driving standardisation, and defining end-to-end test strategies.Randstad Technologies is acting as an Employment Business in relation to this vacancy
Salary description
£550.00 - £600.00 per day