Data Test Lead

Our Data & Intelligence Portfolio continues to experience significant growth, driven by new client engagements and increasing demand across our existing account. As demand continues to exceed forecasts, we are expanding our permanent engineering capability to support delivery excellence, strengthen our technical leadership community, and build sustainable capability for future growth. We are looking for an experienced hands-on QA Lead to operate across multiple delivery teams.

The role combines quality governance, technical leadership, quality engineering expertise and stakeholder management. The successful candidate will support multiple delivery teams and their Quality Engineers, ensuring that testing activities align with the QA Strategy while providing practical guidance, technical challenge and assurance throughout delivery.
The QA Lead will be expected to be an active participant in delivery, supporting planning, design, implementation, testing, defect investigation and quality governance activities.

Hybrid working:
The places that you work from day to day will vary according to your role, your needs, and those of the business;
it will be a blend of Company offices, client sites, and your home; noting that you will be unable to work at home 100% of the
time.

If you are successfully offered this position, you will go through a series of pre-employment checks, including:

identity, nationality (single or dual) or immigration status, employment history going back 3 continuous years, and unspent
criminal record check (known as Disclosure and Barring Service)

Quality Leadership

• Implement the existing QA Strategy across assigned delivery teams.
• Produce and maintain project-level Test Approaches aligned to the QA Strategy.
• Ensure testing activities remain risk-based, proportionate and aligned to delivery objectives.
• Provide quality leadership and/or support Quality Engineers during sprint planning, backlog refinement, stand-ups, reviews and governance forums.
• Drive adoption of Quality Engineering and shift-left practices.
• Support evidence-based quality decision making and quality gate governance.

Quality Engineering Leadership

• Support and mentor Quality Engineers embedded within delivery teams.
• Provide technical coaching on test design, automation strategy and test implementation.
• Support Quality Engineers during technical discussions with developers, architects and stakeholders.
• Assist teams with complex defect investigations, root cause analysis and risk assessments.
• Review test artefacts and provide guidance on appropriate test coverage.
• Promote automation-first and CI/CD-integrated testing approaches.

Technical Leadership

• Influence technical low-level designs and ensure solutions are designed for testability.
• Participate in low-level design workshops and architecture discussions.
• Review quality risks associated with data engineering design, integrations and deployments.
• Challenge technical solutions where quality, operability, maintainability or testability concerns exist.
• Support implementation of quality controls within CI/CD pipelines.

The successful candidate should possess strong technical credibility and be comfortable working alongside software engineers in a modern engineering environment.

Source Control and Delivery

• Git
• Git workflows
• Feature branching strategies
• Merge Requests / Pull Requests
• Branch management
• Repository administration
• SSH key configuration
• Commit, pull, push and clone processes

Experience of:

• Git Lab
• Git Lab CI/CD
• Git Lab Pipelines
• Automated Quality Gates
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery

Application Technology

• SQL
• ETL Tooling
• AWS Cloud environments

Practical understanding sufficient to engage in technical discussions and challenge delivery approaches.

Essential

• Comfortable leading discussions within delivery and project forums.
• Able to identify quality risks and raise them proactively.
• Confident providing constructive challenge to developers, programme QA leads, architects, delivery managers and stakeholders.
• Able to facilitate difficult conversations regarding testing scope, quality risks and delivery readiness.
• Comfortable coaching, mentoring and supporting Quality Engineers.
• Demonstrates visible leadership and engagement within Agile delivery teams.
• Able to communicate technical and quality concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

To be successfully appointed to this role, it is a requirement to obtain Security Check (SC)…