{"id":3643751,"url":"https://alion.io/job/kaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2","title":"Director, Quality & Release Engineering","company":{"id":51455,"name":"Kaluza","domain":"kaluza.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/kaluza","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":30,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["London, United Kingdom","Bristol, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":180000,"currency":"GBP","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":241472},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":true,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Context Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Shift-Left Security","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-01T11:24:45Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-01","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T07:13:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":33,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":33},"description":"Location: London or Bristol, UK (hybrid, three days a week in the office)\nLevel: Director\nTeam: Quality & Release\nSalary: £150,000 - £180,000 + discretionary bonus\nContract: Permanent\nReporting To: VP Engineering\nPlease note: This role requires an existing right to work in the UK. We can’t offer visa sponsorship, but we review sponsorship role by role, so keep an eye on our careers site for future opportunities.\n\nAbout Kaluza\nKaluza is the Energy Intelligence Platform, turning energy complexity into seamless coordination. We help energy companies overcome today’s challenges while accelerating the shift to a clean, electrified future.\nOur platform orchestrates millions of real-time decisions across homes, devices, markets and grids. By combining predictive algorithms with human-centred design, Kaluza makes clean energy dependable, affordable and adaptive to everyday life.\nWith teams across Europe, Asia and Australia, and a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, we power leading companies including OVO, AGL and ENGIE, as well as innovators like Volvo and Volkswagen.\n\nWhat you’ll do\nThe quality engineering function is shifting from manual oversight and process governance toward an AI-assisted product development lifecycle where QA leads its own domain test strategy and bespoke tooling drives automation maturity. This role will drive this shift in our organization and ways of working.\nYou will own quality and release governance at programme level, directly manage an engineering team building AI-assisted automation and test data capability, and set the standard that QA leads across delivery streams work to. You will be as comfortable driving change as you are accountable for outcomes. Responsibilities will include:\nStrategic Quality Leadership\nOwn and evolve the quality strategy across delivery streams, aligned to programme objectives and client SLAs\n\nDefine and maintain release governance frameworks - release readiness criteria, risk acceptance, and sign-off authorities\n\nSet quality standards and coverage expectations; ensure QA leads translate these into domain-level test strategies\n\nDrive defect governance at programme level - internal and client-facing SLA compliance\n\nRepresent quality and risk in senior leadership, architecture, and product forums\n\nAI-Driven Tooling & Automation\nDirectly manage a team of engineers building and maintaining bespoke automation tooling, leveraging AI and LLM capabilities\n\nOwn the test data management strategy - including AI-assisted synthetic data generation and environment data integrity\n\nEvaluate and select off-the-shelf AI testing tools; define governance frameworks for their use and validation\n\nEnsure governance gates are maintained as AI participation in the PDLC grows - accountable humans must remain in the loop for risk acceptance and production judgement\n\nEstablish tooling standards that QA leads can adopt across domains without creating dependency on a central bottleneck\n\nQA Function Leadership & Operating Model\nLead, develop, and performance-manage QA leads embedded across domains; define the operating model and career framework for the function\n\nOwn the accountability split clearly: QA leads own test strategy and tooling choices for their domain; this role owns the standard they work to\n\nDrive consistency across streams without becoming a handoff point - enable QA leads to move fast within well-defined guardrails\n\nBuild a quality engineering culture - not a bug-finding one\n\nChange Management & Adoption\nLead the transformation of QA practice from script maintenance to intelligent, risk-based, AI-assisted quality engineering\n\nDrive upskilling across the function - building capability in AI tooling, context engineering, and agent-assisted workflows\n\nManage resistance and build confidence in new ways of working; bring the team through change without losing them\n\nCommunicate quality outcomes in business terms to senior stakeholders - escaped defect rates, release stability, risk posture\n\nRelease Management\nOwn the release quality process end-to-end: environment strategy, regression coverage, go/no-go decisions, and post-release monitoring\n\nEmbed shift-left practices - quality gates early in the PDLC, not just at release\n\nManage the tension between delivery velocity and release stability, particularly as AI-generated code volumes increase\n\nWhat you’ll bring\nIdeally, you’ll have:\nProven track record leading a QA or quality engineering function of significant scale - including embedded domain leads and direct management of practitioners\n\nHas directly managed engineers building tooling or automation infrastructure - not just managed QA practitioners executing test plans\n\nHas delivered a meaningful QA transformation: AI adoption, automation maturity uplift, defect governance overhaul, or similar\n\nHas worked in a multi-client or multi-product platform environment, managing quality outcomes across concurrent delivery streams\n\nHas owned release governance in a complex, multi-stream delivery context - including go/no-go accountability\n\nExposure to energy, utilities, billing, or similarly regulated complex domains is a plus - not essential Strong grounding in test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration - sufficient to credibly lead engineers building these things\n\nWorking knowledge of LLMs and AI tooling in a QA context: test generation, defect triage, coverage analysis, synthetic test data\n\nUnderstands test data management principles and the challenges of environment data integrity at scale\n\nAble to evaluate build vs. buy for tooling; assess AI testing platforms with appropriate scepticism Comfortable setting strategy and being accountable for outcomes - not just owning process\n\nAble to operate at programme level with senior engineering and product stakeholders\n\nExperienced in leading distributed, multi-timezone quality functions\n\nStrong communicator - translates quality metrics into business outcomes; can make the case for investment in tooling and governance Demonstrated experience leading practice transformation in an engineering context\n\nAble to bring people with them through transitions that challenge established ways of working\n\nComfortable with ambiguity; can hold direction steady while the detail is still being worked out\n\nFamiliar with observability, production monitoring, and shift-right quality practices\n\nOur Values\nFive values guide how we work at Kaluza:\nPlay to win: Collective pride in decarbonising energy at scale.\n\nSolve the real problem: Cutting through complexity to focus on real-world outcomes.\n\nBuild trust every day: Consistency, transparency and doing what we say.\n\nOwn the outcome: Full accountability, wins and setbacks, without ego.\n\nGo further together: Collaboration, respect and different perspectives.\n\nOur Perks\nTime off and family: 26 days’ holiday, plus 26 weeks’ full pay for new parents with no qualifying service period\n\nHealth and security: Private medical insurance with virtual GP, life assurance, pension scheme, free mortgage advice and eye tests\n\nPay and flexibility: Discretionary bonus, a Flex Fund of 5% [of salary] to spend on the benefits you want most, retail discounts through Perks at Work\n\nGrowth and setup: Personal learning budget, home office budget\n\nClimate: Furthr, our climate action app\n\nCome as you are\nWe want to meet people from all walks of life. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be, and we recognise talent on merit and potential. If you’re excited about the role but don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you.\nFind out more on ourcareers page andLinkedIn. Our Applicant Data Protection Policy is here.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7675,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Home office"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Billing & Subscription Management","Smart Grid","Energy Management"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-11-02T22:14:00Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"GB","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"Licensed UK visa sponsor (Skilled Worker, Senior or Specialist Worker)","filings_12m":null,"filings_prev_12m":null,"green_card_filings_12m":null,"median_offered_wage_usd":null,"route":"Skilled Worker; Global Business Mobility: Senior or Specialist Worker","cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-11-04T06:27:35+00:00","sources":["UK Home Office: register of licensed sponsors (workers)"],"filings_for_role_12m":0}],"liveness":{"score":47,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.863,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":33,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":241472,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/kaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/kaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T10:40:51Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":15859,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":51455},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=51455"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fkaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fkaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fkaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/kaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fkaluza-director-quality-release-engineering-2"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3643751}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"kaluza.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3643751},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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