Quality Assurance Engineering Manager

We are standing up a dedicated QA automation function, and we're looking for a QA Engineering Manager to build and lead it from the ground up. 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.

In your first 90 days, you'll start with discovery: partnering with our Principal AI Engineer and AI team to understand existing AI tools and practices, and working with engineering teams to understand current QA practices and define how QA and engineering will collaborate going forward. In parallel, you'll confirm prerequisites (environments, CI/CD, critical user journeys), select your tooling and framework, and stand up a proof-of-concept suite on the highest-risk flows. By the end of year one, you'll have delivered a working, trusted automation suite on critical flows, a small high-performing team, a quality metrics dashboard in active use, and a clear plan for AI adoption.

What You Will Do

• 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.
• Drive a risk-based approach to testing so effort goes where it protects clients most.
• 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.

What You Bring

• 7+ years in software quality or engineering, including 3+ years leading and growing engineers.
• A track record of building or significantly maturing a test automation practice.
• 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.
• Hands-on understanding of how AI is changing testing, with sound judgement on where it helps and where it doesn't. Experience evaluating or adopting AI-assisted QA tooling or a credible plan for doing so.
• Familiarity with testing AI or LLM features (evaluation harnesses, golden datasets, guardrails, bias and accuracy checks), or the ability to get there quickly.

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).