QA lead

We are hiring a hands-on QA Lead to own quality across our full commercial technology stack - every system a customer, distributor, or sales team touches between browsing a product and receiving an order. That chain starts on our brand sites and B2B customer portal, runs through search, product configuration, quoting and checkout, and lands in our ERP as a priced, credit-checked, shippable order. This is a doing role: you will write and execute test cases yourself, lead a small QA team to your standards, and give the documented go / no-go on every release.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• Customer-facing storefronts - brand sites and the B2B portal - onboarding, account and company management, catalogue, cart, checkout, order history, returns, documents.

• Search, discovery and product content - relevance, faceting, autocomplete, and the attributes, media, and cross-sell data behind them.

• Quote, configure and price - configurators, guided selling, quote creation and approval, contract and customer-specific pricing, lead times and availability.

• Integration and data flows - storefront to middleware to PIM, CRM and ERP - customer and product masters, order submission, shipment and invoice status, payload validation, failure handling, reconciliation.

• ERP and downstream reporting - order creation, pricing and tax, credit holds, inventory and fulfilment, invoicing, and the dashboards and data layer leadership runs the business on.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Test strategy and planning. Own the strategy, plan, and estimate for every initiative - scope, depth, environments, data, entry and exit criteria. Maintain a live QA risk register and bring it to every release decision. Keep full traceability between requirements and test cases in both directions.

• Test case design and coverage - the core of this role. Personally author clear, complete test cases a new joiner could execute unaided. Decompose business processes - order-to-cash, quote-to-order, returns, onboarding, price change, product launch - into flows covering happy path, edge, negative, and recovery cases. Own the regression suite and the test data strategy, and peer-review the team's cases before execution starts.

• Test execution - manual and automated. Execute alongside the team across functional, integration, end-to-end, regression, smoke, SIT and UAT. Decide what earns automation and what stays manual. Own the automation outcome - coverage, reliability, runtime, and failures that point straight at the cause. Prepare and shepherd business UAT.

• Release management and QA sign-off. Own release readiness: define and run the checklist, chair go / no-go with engineering, product and business, and give the documented sign-off or the documented reason to hold. Cover environment readiness, deployment validation, production smoke tests, rollback verification, and post-release monitoring. Run the QA calendar across concurrent initiatives and keep change-control evidence audit-ready.

• Defect management and reporting. Triage, reproduce, prioritise and drive defects to closure. Publish QA status an executive can read in ninety seconds. Track defect-escape rate, requirement coverage, regression cycle time, and reopened defects - and run a quality retrospective on every release.

• Governance and team leadership. Define and enforce the QA governance framework - templates, conventions, severity definitions, quality gates, and protocol checklists - across your team and our delivery partners. Lead, coach and grow the QA engineers, allocate capacity across initiatives, and push testing earlier by reviewing requirements for testability before code is written.

MUST HAVE

• 9+ years in QA, including 3+ years leading a team and owning quality for a platform or programme rather than a single application.

• Proven ownership of test strategy, planning, estimation, and a risk register across concurrent initiatives.

• Exceptional test case design - bring a suite you wrote and walk us through what it covers and what it deliberately does not.

• Strong hands-on execution across functional, integration, end-to-end, regression, SIT and UAT. This role stays in the tooling every week.

• Release management in practice - readiness checklists, go / no-go facilitation, documented QA sign-off, post-release validation.

• Working automation capability: read, run, maintain and extend an automated suite, and judge what is worth automating. Framework depth matters less than judgement.

• End-to-end testing across integrated systems - front end through middleware into a system of record, including payload and data validation, not just screens.

• Confident SQL - you query the data to prove a result rather than trusting the UI.

• Excellent reporting and written communication; defect discipline, and the spine to hold a release when the evidence says hold.

• Experience establishing QA governance or protocols and getting a team to actually follow them.

GOOD TO HAVE

Not required - but each one shortens your ramp-up and counts in your favour.

• ERP. Hands-on testing of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (sales order entry, advanced pricing, customer and item master, inventory, shipping, invoicing) or Oracle E-Business Suite (Order Management, Pricing, Inventory, Receivables). ERP migration, upgrade, or ERP-to-commerce integration testing.

• CRM and service. Salesforce - out-of-the-box and customisations (flows, validation rules, Apex-backed behaviour) across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, CPQ or Field Service. SAP order-management processes. Case, RMA, warranty or field service workflows.

• Commerce and customer-facing applications. BigCommerce, ideally B2B Edition (companies, buyers, sales reps, quotes, price lists, buyer approvals), or a comparable B2B platform. Algolia or another enterprise search platform - relevance, ranking, faceting, synonyms, index freshness. Headless storefronts, configurators and CPQ, headless CMS content workflows.

• PIM, integration and data. Perfion or another PIM (Akeneo, inRiver, Salsify). Integrations on Oracle Integration Cloud, MuleSoft or Boomi - error handling, retries, reconciliation. Microsoft Fabric and Power BI - validating pipelines and report figures against source. Data-layer and tracking validation with Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager. Being able to write your own queries against these platforms is a real edge.

• Credentials and ways of working. ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Manager or Test Analyst). Test management tooling - Jira with Xray, Zephyr, TestRail, qTest or Azure Test Plans. Automation exposure - Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Cucumber/BDD, Postman. Performance and accessibility testing. Testing AI or ML-driven features where the expected result is probabilistic. Industrial, sensors or manufacturing B2B domain backgrou