Quality & Release Engineering Manager

About the role:

As the Quality & Release Engineering Manager, you are the air-traffic controller, guardrail facilitator, and connective tissue of our engineering ecosystem. Evolving past traditional QA/QE management, this role focuses on the holistic efficiency, reliability, and predictability of our complete software delivery initiatives.

Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering and operating as a peer to the Engineering Managers (EMs), you will act as the data-driven conscience of our technical teams and an extension of engineering leadership. You will not own the application code, but you will deeply own the system of delivery.

This isn't a role for a passive box-checker. We need an adaptable, independent driver who can act as the ultimate guardian of our ongoing release quality and a reliable conduit of delivery information for internal stakeholders - zooming out to discover material changes to interconnected metrics, zooming in to help untangle operational dependencies, and stepping up to point out necessary change across cross-functional teams without creating friction.

Duties & Responsibilities:

Core Responsibilities (Your Immediate Focus)

• Team Leadership & Transformation: Directly manage, mentor, and elevate a distributed team of QA/QE Engineers working across customer and corporate applications. You will evaluate current capabilities, propose necessary changes, and upskill the team to focus heavily on test automation and AI-leveraged effectiveness.
• Release & Delivery Coordination: Own the release schedule and the coordination of all included changes. Ensure project, BAU and ad-hoc work flows through a safe, visible, and efficient path to production.
• Observability & SDLC Metrics: Collaborate with various teams and stakeholders to identify critical tracking requirements and influence the methodology for data collection. You will be responsible for creating unified reporting dashboards from the ground up, utilizing tools such as Honeycomb, Snyk, ClickUp, and Pendo. Your role involves monitoring platform health, security vulnerabilities, and velocity, then distilling these various data points into a clear narrative for executive leaders. Critically, you will proactively identify and escalate concerns to the relevant teams when performance or quality metrics begin to decline.
• Track Cross-cutting Activities: Collate any actions identified as a result of Post Incident Reviews, Static Code Analysis, Penetration Tests, shared Decision Registers plus overarching Policy changes. Ensure that they are resolved by the relevant teams within agreed timeframes.
• Performance Lab Ownership: Take ownership of our rudimentary performance testing lab and define the strategic roadmap to mature it into a robust, reliable system.

Strategic Initiatives (What You'll Build Toward):

• Shift-Left & Global Governance: Establish and enforce a global Definition of Done. Partner with cross-functional teams to embed QA early in the design phase and champion the use of ephemeral environments.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Cloud & Security Engineering (CSE) to co-own and deeply integrate Service Level Objectives (SLOs) into the release pipeline. Trigger blameless PIRs when SLOs are breached or change failures occur, supplying the relevant leaders with the data needed for root-cause analysis.
• Be the Stakeholder Conduit: Act as a reliable source of truth for internal teams (Product, Support, Go To Market and Distribution). For support teams you will translate technical milestones, release readiness, feature rollout schedules and BAU updates into business-friendly context, release notes and support guides.
• The path towards Continuous Delivery: Be the driver of change towards automated release processes working with Engineering Managers and key stakeholders.

What "Good" Looks Like in Your First 6-12 Months:

• Proactive Visibility: The Head of Engineering / CTO no longer has to ask, "How are we looking?" You have established proactive, automated alerts for potential negative impacts regarding performance, change failures, or security vulnerabilities. We have comprehensive dashboards available to view the trends in these metrics over time.
• Platform Stability: The business sees a verifiable reduction in change failures and other quality metrics across QA, UAT, and Production environments.
• Modernized QA: Your team members are operating as embedded QA champions within teams, uplifting teams utilising tools like AI and ephemeral test environments early in the delivery pipeline to improve outcomes.
• Influencing Change: You are confidently and successfully pushing Engineering Managers to make active, measurable improvements to their code quality and testing practices.

Skills & Experience:

• 10+ years of experience in technology roles, with at least 3 years in a technology leadership position (QA/QE Manager, Engineering Manager or similar) in a high-growth environment.
• A strong background in software engineering or test engineering is highly beneficial. A demonstrated track record of leading quality/delivery transformation programmes.
• You know how to have productive, difficult conversations with Product or Engineering peers. You can confidently navigate the tension between "shipping fast" and "shipping right."
• You have deep familiarity with modern CI/CD concepts, test automation strategies, and observability tools. You know what good delivery pipelines look like, even if you are relying on another team to write the underlying infrastructure code.
• You understand how software delivery impacts the bottom line and Go-To-Market strategies. You can adjust your communication style to resonate with a developer debugging code just as effectively as a stakeholder awaiting a feature release.
• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field is desirable.