Lead Quality Engineer - Contract

Job Title: Lead Quality Engineer 

Location: UK Wide - Remote

Role type: Contract

IR35: Outside

Duration: 6 months (initially)

Start Date: ASAP

Who we are:

We're an award-winning Tech Consultancy, focused in Quality Engineering on a mission to become the UK's #1.

What we do:

"Champion and Engineer Quality and Software". Over the past 6 years, we've shaped and transformed our offering so that passion, precision, and attention to every minuscule detail is baked into everything we do. Born from a desire to bring automation expertise to our current and prospective clients, 5 years ago we shaped our offering.

Project Info:

The client is at an early stage of its quality engineering transformation, with different levels of maturity across its five product teams. While some automated testing is already in place, coverage and practices are inconsistent, and several teams still rely heavily on manual testing.

Playwright and TypeScript are already being used across the teams, with licensed GitHub Copilot available to help accelerate test code generation. The successful candidate will help build on this foundation by improving existing suites, developing frameworks where needed, expanding automated API testing and supporting engineers in making better use of the available tooling.

You'll work closely with developers and existing testers, including a small number of manual testers who will benefit from hands-on coaching and support in developing their automation capabilities.

This is a genuinely varied role, with an equal balance of hands-on engineering, strategic improvement and technical coaching. You'll have the opportunity to influence how quality is approached across the organisation and help establish practices that can be shared and adopted across teams.

What we’re looking for:

We're looking for someone who is passionate about quality engineering and understands that quality is a shared responsibility, not simply a testing phase at the end of development.

You'll bring extensive experience across the software delivery lifecycle, with the technical credibility to pair with engineers, challenge existing practices constructively and lead improvements through collaboration rather than prescription.

We're looking for a pragmatic, forward-thinking Lead Quality Engineer who can balance strategy with implementation: someone who can assess the current landscape, identify opportunities for improvement and work alongside teams to make those improvements a reality.

You'll be comfortable operating at lead or principal level, influencing without direct authority and helping engineers develop the skills, confidence and mindset to build quality into everything they do.

You'll need to be:

• A Quality Engineering practitioner. You'll bring extensive experience in Quality Engineering, Test Engineering or Software Engineering at Lead or Principal level, with the ability to operate across both technical delivery and wider engineering strategy.

• A lover of code! You'll have strong hands-on experience with test automation, ideally using TypeScript and Playwright, with the ability to build frameworks, improve existing automation suites and support engineers in adopting effective testing practices.

• Experienced in modern testing strategy. You'll understand how to design and implement an effective testing approach across the SDLC, including unit, component, integration, API and end-to-end testing.

• Passionate about shift-left quality. You'll know how to move testing earlier in the development lifecycle, embedding quality into discovery, refinement, development and delivery rather than relying on manual testing once code has been completed.

• Confident working with CI/CD pipelines. You'll understand how to integrate automated testing into delivery pipelines to support faster, more reliable and continuous releases.

• Comfortable driving change. You'll have a proven track record of improving engineering practices within a large, complex or transforming organisation, helping teams move towards more mature, product-led ways of working.

• A collaborative technical leader. You'll be confident pairing and mobbing with engineers of all levels, coaching by doing and helping others build their automation and quality engineering capabilities.

• An effective influencer. You'll be comfortable challenging decisions constructively, sharing clear, evidence-based opinions and influencing senior stakeholders and delivery teams without relying on formal authority.

• Pragmatic and outcome-focused. You'll be able to assess existing practices, identify the improvements that will have the greatest impact and implement solutions that are sustainable, proportionate and aligned with business needs.

• A strong communicator and team player. We value diversity of thought, openness and accountability. You'll be comfortable sharing knowledge, challenging the status quo and working collaboratively to make quality a shared responsibility.

It would be great if you also had:

• Experience supporting a transition to product-aligned or platform-based team structures.

• Exposure to observability, performance testing and security testing practices.

• Experience introducing or improving automated API testing.

• Experience coaching manual testers and software engineers to develop their automation skills and adopt modern quality engineering practices.

Please apply directly if you are interested in the opportunity - please note, we cannot provide sponsorship for this role, all applicants must already live and work in the UK for at least the last 5 years with no need of sponsorship.