Quality Assurance Engineering Manager

About the role

This is a rare opportunity to shape a quality practice from scratch: you'll choose the tooling, set the standards, hire the team, and define how AI fits into how we test. This is a hands-on, player-coach role. You'll split your time roughly 50/50 between leading the team and doing the work yourself: setting direction, hiring, and coaching on one side, and writing automated tests, building framework components, and reviewing code on the other. You'll lead by example and stay close enough to the code to make sound calls and earn the trust of the engineers you lead.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the quality engineering strategy and roadmap across our products
• Stay hands-on: personally write automated tests, build framework components, and review code alongside the team (roughly half your time)
• Select the test automation tooling and framework, and set the standards squads build on
• Integrate automated testing into our CI/CD pipelines and partner with DevOps on stable, repeatable deployments
• Define quality gates: what blocks a merge and what blocks a release, aligned with engineering leadership and risk
• Push tests down the stack (API before UI), drive down the flaky-test rate, and enable squads so the practice doesn't depend on any one person
• Hire, coach, and grow a team of automation engineers, and raise testing discipline across product squads
• Own quality metrics and a dashboard that leadership trusts, providing objective signals for go/no-go release decisions
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted testing tools (test generation, self-healing tests, defect triage, agentic testing) through a practical, hybrid model, while keeping a human-in-the-loop standard so AI-generated tests and code are reviewed, not trusted blindly

Requirements

7+ years in software quality or engineering, including 3+ years leading and growing engineers

Current, hands-on coding ability: you can build framework components and write automated tests yourself, and you want to keep doing so in this role

Strong technical judgement on automation frameworks, CI/CD, and test architecture, backed by recent hands-on experience

Fluency with modern automation tooling (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium) and CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI)

Experience defining quality metrics and using them to influence release decisions

Clear communicator who can translate quality risk into terms leadership and product can act on

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with Claude and Claude Code
• Background as an SDET or automation engineer earlier in your career
• Experience introducing quality practices into an organisation that did not have them before
• Experience in a regulated or high-reliability domain (utilities, fintech, healthcare or similar)