User Acceptance Testing lead

Job Summary

UAT Lead will oversee the planning, coordination, and execution of User Acceptance Testing to ensure business requirements are met before each release. The role also provides leadership in establishing and maturing the organization's User Acceptance Testing capability, including defining best practices, governance standards, and scalable testing frameworks across business initiatives. The role encompasses building and maintaining a well‑structured UAT repository, developing a business‑critical regression suite, partnering with QA and development teams to convert stable UAT scenarios into automated regression coverage, and leveraging outputs to support defect triage, risk management, and release readiness within a Customs and Trade compliance environment.

The UAT Lead will act as the central authority for UAT across business and technology teams, ensuring stakeholder alignment, effective test execution, and transparent reporting of testing outcomes and risks to leadership.

UAT test repository creation, classification & maintenance: Establish and continuously update a centralized UAT test repository as the single source of truth for all test scenarios and test cases. Lead the design, governance, and improvement of the enterprise UAT repository to support consistent testing practices. Classify and stratify test scenarios by business area, workflow type, risk level, priority, and other measures to enable efficient test selection and impact analysis.

Apply consistent naming conventions, tagging, versioning, and traceability standards so that test cases are easily searchable, reusable, and auditable across releases. Manage retirement or archival of obsolete scenarios and incorporate new coverage as products evolve, ensuring the repository remains current and actionable.

Regression suite creation and maintenance: Identify stable UAT scenarios for conversion into an automated regression suite to support earlier defect detection. Identify high‑risk, high‑value workflows and develop a structured regression suite (smoke, sanity, full regression). Maintain regression documentation, versioning, and change control aligned to product evolution. Use production incidents, defect trends, and risk hot spots to continuously strengthen regression coverage. Define and evolve regression testing strategy to ensure critical business workflows are consistently validated across releases and system changes.

Automation partnership and collaboration: Work with QA and development teams to identify UAT regression candidates for automation, ensuring business intent, expected outcomes, and test data needs are clearly defined and reusable. Define and maintain automation candidate criteria (stable flow, deterministic outcomes, reliable data setup). Validate automated test results by reviewing expected outcomes and confirming business correctness. Provide subject‑matter leadership on business workflow validation to ensure automated testing reflects real operational processes.

Defect triage and release readiness: Reproduce issues with clear documentation, evidence, severity/priority assignment. Coordinate with QA and development teams to validate fixes and re‑test targeted regression. Interpret CI pipeline reports (screenshots, logs, pass/fail outputs) to distinguish product defects from environment, data, or test stability issues. Lead defect triage discussions with cross‑functional stakeholders to prioritize issues based on operational risk and business impact.

Reporting and release readiness: Provide clear reports on UAT progress, defect status, risks, and go/no‑go recommendations. Produce UAT completion artifacts including traceability matrices, pass/fail summaries, outstanding risks, and sign‑off packages. Prepare and present regular testing progress updates to project leadership and business stakeholders to support informed release decisions.

Continuous improvement: Refine templates, standards, and test repositories to reduce cycle time and increase consistency. Identify opportunities to expand automated coverage while maintaining UAT efficiency. Champion adoption of modern testing…