Senior Quality Engineering Manager

The opportunity

We are looking for a hands-on Senior Quality Engineering Manager to implement, lead and continuously improve our Quality Engineering function. This is a functional leadership role, not primarily an individual-contributor automation position. You will inherit an established QA team with manual, automation, API and performance-testing capabilities and develop a coherent quality strategy, operating model and measurable standards that reduce defects reaching customers.

The role requires someone who has done this before: establishing risk-based testing, strengthening automation and release controls, developing engineers, and working constructively with Product, Engineering and DevOps to prevent recurring production failures.

What you will own

Quality strategy and operating model

• Define and maintain a risk-based quality engineering strategy covering web, mobile, APIs, integrations and business-critical customer journeys.
• Translate product requirements, customer risks and business objectives into test approaches, coverage priorities, acceptance evidence and quality goals.
• Establish practical test-planning standards, test-case design and traceability, defect workflows, SOPs, quality gates and clear escalation paths.

Test architecture and technical leadership

• Own the direction and effectiveness of functional, exploratory, API, integration, end-to-end, regression and performance testing.
• Assess and improve automation frameworks, test data, environments and CI/CD integration; review technical design and code, and troubleshoot or contribute hands-on when necessary.
• Prioritize high-risk failure scenarios including pricing and availability changes, third-party API failures, timeouts, retries, asynchronous events, payment states and booking consistency.
• Guide coverage across Angular web, Android and iOS applications and Node.js/TypeScript backend services; select tools based on maintainability and value, not tool familiarity alone.

Release quality and production learning

• Establish evidence-based release readiness, critical-path regression criteria, defect disposition and QA risk recommendations, with documented exceptions and accountable release decisions.
• Analyze serious, escaped defects and repeat failures; lead the QA contribution to root cause analysis and ensure prevention actions feed back into development and testing.
• Partner with Engineering and DevOps on environment parity, observability, performance bottlenecks, testability and production verification.

People and cross-functional leadership

• Assess the existing QA team, clarify responsibilities, coach engineers, manage performance and recommend targeted capability development or hiring.
• Embed QA early in discovery, requirements refinement, architecture discussions and sprint planning; establish shared quality responsibilities with Product and Engineering.
• Own a concise quality scorecard, credible baselines, improvement priorities and regular evidence-based reporting to engineering leadership.

What we are looking for

Essential

• Proven experience leading a QA or Quality Engineering function for a live software product, including demonstrable improvements in production quality or release reliability.
• Strong practical grounding in automation architecture and implementation, API and integration testing, regression design, and testing of distributed or asynchronous systems.
• Experience with consumer-facing, transaction-heavy products such as e-commerce, marketplaces, fintech or travel technology.
• Ability to design quality controls that teams actually use, with clear ownership, pragmatic risk decisions and measurable outcomes.
• Strong people leadership and communication skills; confidence to challenge assumptions and collaborate across Product, Engineering and DevOps.
• Experience integrating test suites into CI/CD and evaluating test reliability, coverage and maintenance costs.

Relevant technologies and useful experience

Experience with Playwright or Selenium, Appium, REST API testing frameworks, JMeter or k6, GitLab CI/CD and cloud-hosted microservices is valuable. Familiarity with payment flows, webhooks, third-party supplier APIs, idempotency, concurrency, performance profiling and production telemetry is particularly relevant. Equivalent tools and architectures are acceptable where the underlying technical judgment is strong.

AI-assisted test generation and analysis may be used where useful, provided outputs are reviewed for correctness, coverage and maintainability.

What success looks like

• First 30 days: establish an evidence-based baseline of defect escapes, test effectiveness, environments, team capabilities and release controls; agree a prioritized improvement plan.
• By 90 days: operate risk-based test planning, critical-path regression, release evidence and serious-defect RCA; show tangible improvements in automation reliability and high-risk coverage.
• By six months: demonstrate sustained progress in escaped-defect trends, repeat defects, release predictability and team independence, using agreed baselines and shared engineering ownership.

Decision rights and collaboration

The role owns QA standards, testing strategy, QA team performance and quality-risk recommendations. Engineering remains accountable for code quality and technical release decisions; Product owns requirement clarity and acceptance; DevOps owns deployment and infrastructure controls. The QA Manager may withhold QA sign-off against agreed criteria and escalate risks, while final release authority and exception approval are defined by the organization.

This role is expected to lead and technically guide specialist work, not personally execute every test. Security assessments and other niche testing may be coordinated with internal owners or external specialists.