Group Engineering Lead - QA & Automation

As a Group Engineering Leader - Quality, for the Player Experience pillar, you will automate, validate and ship software with AI as an important part of how you work, reporting to the Head of Engineering.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and grow a large, distributed QA team across manual testing, automation, API, performance, and specialist testing.
• Set a portfolio-wide quality strategy, standards, release gates, and clear ownership across teams.
• Drive a pragmatic shift from manual-heavy regression to automation, prioritising high-value, repeatable tests.
• Own the Playwright strategy: framework design, coding standards, reusable components, test data, environments, reporting, and CI/CD integration.
• Ensure coverage spans UI, API, integration, regression, and critical end-to-end journeys.
• Work with engineering, product, architecture, and delivery leaders to build quality in from requirements and design through production.
• Use risk-based testing and business impact to guide test depth, release readiness, and escalation decisions.
• Establish useful quality measures such as escaped defects, automation reliability and coverage, regression cycle time, and release risk.
• Improve flaky-test management, failure triage, and feedback speed so automation is trusted by delivery teams.
• Build capability through hiring, coaching, career paths, and clear expectations for both manual and automation roles.
• Communicate portfolio quality, delivery risk, and improvement plans clearly to senior stakeholders.

Requirements:

• 15+ years of experience in professional software engineering with a good blend of domain knowledge.
• Led large or multi-team QA/QE functions, ideally across several products or delivery streams.
• Managed both manual QA and automation specialists, with examples of developing team capability.
• Personally driven an automation transformation and can explain what they automated first, what they kept manual, and why.
• Strong working knowledge of Playwright, preferably with TypeScript or JavaScript, and experience operating it in CI/CD.
• Broad testing experience covering UI, API, integration, regression, and release testing.
• A record of improving quality outcomes—not just increasing automation counts.
• Strong planning, stakeholder management, prioritisation, and risk communication skills.
• Enough technical depth to review framework design and challenge implementation choices, while focusing day-to-day on leadership and outcomes.

Skills

API Testing, Automation Framework, Automation Strategy, Azure DevOps, CI / CD, Director of Quality Engineering, GitHub, Head of QA, Integration Testing, JavaScript, Jenkins, Manual Testing, Playwright, QA Director, QA Engineering Manager, QA Lead, Quality Engineering Lead, Senior QA Manager, Test Automation, TypeScript