Lead Tester / QA Lead
Lead Tester / QA Lead (Manual & Automation)
Oxfordshire / Hybrid (1 day per week in office) – Easily commutable from Oxford, Milton Keynes, Birmingham and London (direct rail)
£60,000 to £70,000 plus benefits
We are looking for a talented Lead Tester to join a growing software business who are investing heavily in quality, with a string of technical hires this year and a brand-new testing function being created – which you will build.
Working alongside a small, cross-functional team of developers and product people, you will be the company’s first dedicated testing hire, owning quality across a business management platform used by several independent businesses, with more joining over the next couple of years. You will define the testing strategy, standards and tooling from a blank page, then recruit and lead a small QA team to run it – taking the function from the first test plan through to an embedded part of every release.
On a typical day, you will be writing test plans and regression packs, running functional and acceptance testing across new features and releases, working through defect triage with the developers, and deciding where automation earns its place. You will work closely with developers, product owners and business stakeholders, and get the satisfaction of seeing your standards shape every release that goes out.
As our ideal candidate, you will have a strong grounding in testing principles and the development lifecycle, experience creating test strategies, plans and regression packs, hands-on manual testing across web, API or database applications, and time spent leading, mentoring or recruiting testers. You will be comfortable in tools such as Azure DevOps or Jira, and ISTQB or ISEB certification is a bonus rather than a must.
Whilst this role leans towards hands-on, manual testing leadership, experience with automated testing tools, CI/CD or performance testing is highly advantageous.
Keywords: Lead Tester, Test Lead, QA Lead, Test Manager, QA Manager, Senior Tester, Senior Test Analyst, Head of QA, Quality Assurance Lead, Senior QA Engineer