Test Manager

A bit about us:

At BNP Paribas Personal Finance, we're part of a global bank and are proud to be a Top Employer UK, providing a great place to work in an open and inclusive environment.

We're here to provide clear and straightforward consumer finance solutions and we work with many well-known retailers and brands to help their customers finance their purchases in a responsible way.

We care about making a positive impact for our colleagues, customers, partners and the wider community. That's why we live by our values of we're positive, we're brave and we own it.

About the Role

As a Test Manager, you will be responsible for defining, leading and governing testing activity across projects, releases and change initiatives, ensuring high-quality IT solutions are delivered in line with business expectations, regulatory obligations and agreed delivery timelines. You will own the end-to-end test approach, manage test planning and execution, oversee defect and risk management, and lead the adoption of test automation and quality engineering practices to improve coverage, efficiency and repeatability. You will provide leadership, reporting and stakeholder engagement across business and technology teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Test Strategy, Governance and Delivery.
• Define and own the overall test strategy, approach and governance model across assigned projects, releases and change initiatives.
• Lead test planning, estimation, resourcing and scheduling, ensuring activities are aligned to delivery milestones and business priorities.
• Oversee the preparation, maintenance and execution of test plans, test scenarios, test cases and automated test assets.
• Define the appropriate automation approach for each delivery, including scope, priorities, tooling, maintenance ownership and integration with the delivery lifecycle.
• Provide oversight of test execution progress, quality metrics, entry and exit criteria, test evidence and audit traceability.
• Lead defect management, including triage, prioritisation, escalation, resolution tracking and reporting using tools such as TFS, Azure DevOps or JIRA.
• Produce clear test status reporting, quality dashboards, risk updates and delivery insights for project stakeholders and leadership teams, including automation coverage, execution trends and regression effectiveness.
• Ensure testing risks, dependencies, issues and assumptions are actively managed and escalated in a timely and appropriate manner.

Continuous Improvement

• Lead continuous improvement of testing processes, standards, templates, metrics and governance to improve quality, consistency and delivery efficiency.
• Drive root-cause analysis for defects, environment issues and delivery blockers, ensuring lessons learned are captured and corrective actions implemented.
• Promote the adoption of modern testing tools, automation frameworks and quality engineering practices where appropriate.
• Champion automation-first thinking by identifying repeatable, high-value scenarios suitable for automation across functional, regression, integration and data-driven testing.
• Work with engineers and analysts to establish maintainable automation standards, including coding conventions, reusable components, test data management and reporting practices.
• Use automation results and quality metrics to identify process improvements, reduce regression cycle times and improve release readiness.
• Develop testing capability within the team through coaching, mentoring, knowledge sharing and consistent application of best practice.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of software testing principles, methodologies, governance and risk-based testing, with ISTQB certification or equivalent experience desirable.
• Proven experience managing testing activity across projects, releases or change portfolios in Agile and/or Waterfall delivery environments.
• Experience of test planning, estimation, resource coordination, stakeholder reporting and governance forums.
• Strong experience defining and managing test automation strategies, including automation scope, prioritisation, framework adoption, maintenance approach and measurable benefits.
• Practical understanding of automation tools and frameworks such as Selenium, Java, C#, JavaScript, AzureDevOps, Jenkins or equivalent technologies.
• Experience integrating automated tests into delivery pipelines and using automation reporting to support release decisions.
• Strong working knowledge of test management and defect tracking tools such as Azure DevOps, TFS or JIRA.
• Experience of using SQL or a sound understanding of database concepts to support analysis, investigation and test preparation.

Required Skills

• Strong leadership, planning and decision-making capability with the ability to manage testing across multiple priorities.
• Excellent attention to detail with the ability to balance strategic oversight, governance and practical delivery.
• Strong communication, stakeholder management, influencing and escalation skills.
• Can lead, coach and support test teams in a structured and cooperative delivery environment.
• Adept at working under pressure, manage competing.