Senior Quality Engineering Manager

The opportunity

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

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