QA Domain Lead

Job Summary

Job Description

Key Accountabilities:

• Own the quality engineering strategy and practice with emphasis on automation, early assurance and measurable production quality.
• Enable teams to release secure, reliable and accessible digital services at pace.
• Establishe quality as a shared, continuous responsibility across product and delivery teams.
• Define the quality engineering strategy, target operating model, standards and maturity roadmap.
• Set risk-based approaches covering functional, integration, regression, performance, resilience, security, accessibility, data and journey quality.
• Clarify accountabilities across product, engineering, architecture, security, operations and suppliers.
• Advise the CIO and executive forums on quality risk, investment priorities and release confidence.
• Establish reusable automation frameworks, test-data approaches, service virtualisation, environments and tooling.
• Embed automated tests and quality controls into CI/CD with fast feedback and governance evidence.
• Prioritise automation according to business criticality, repeatability, defect risk and maintenance cost.
• Drive shift-left defect prevention and shift-right validation using telemetry, synthetic monitoring and production learning.
• Define quality gates, release-readiness criteria, exception processes and evidence by change-risk class.
• Provide measures for defect trends, escaped defects, automation effectiveness, reliability, cycle time and customer impact.
• Lead root-cause learning on material defects and ensures systemic improvements are implemented.
• Provide independent challenge on release risk while helping teams remove quality constraints.
• Lead quality engineering managers, automation specialists, communities of practice and strategic partners.
• Measure success through fewer escaped defects, effective automation, earlier detection, release confidence, non-functional outcomes and lower cycle time.
• First-year priorities include setting the baseline and roadmap, establishing governance and measures, delivering high-value quality improvements and building sustainable capability.

Experience required:

• 8 - 12+ years' experience in Quality Engineering, Quality Assurance or Software Testing.
• Proven experience leading Quality Engineering or QA teams and driving quality practices across multiple digital products, platforms and delivery teams.
• Proven implementation of automated testing at scale within CI/CD and DevSecOps environments.
• Deep experience with functional, API, integration, mobile/web, performance, resilience and production-quality practices.
• Experience establishing risk-based quality governance and using evidence to advise on release readiness.
• Strong track record transforming manual QA into an engineering-led, automation-first practice in a regulated environment.

Technical and business knowledge:

• Quality engineering strategy and test architecture
• Automation frameworks, API and UI testing
• CI/CD quality gates and test observability
• Performance, resilience, accessibility and security testing
• Test data, service virtualisation and environment strategy
• Defect prevention, root-cause analysis and production learning

Education and professial credentials:

• Relevant bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems or a related field. A postgraduate qualification and recognised testing, agile, DevOps, cloud or quality certifications are advantageous.

Education

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised