Lead Test Engineer

Senior Level | Financial Services | Agile Quality Engineering

We are looking for an experienced Lead Test Engineer to take a senior leadership role across testing and quality engineering within a complex, Agile technology environment.

This is a cross-functional leadership position with responsibility for defining and evolving the overall testing strategy, orchestrating testing across multiple squads and ensuring quality is embedded throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

Working within the Release & Test Orchestration function, you will partner closely with Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Release Engineers, Test and Automation Engineers, Developers, Architects and senior Business Stakeholders.

A key part of the mandate will be helping evolve the organisation towards modern Agile engineering and testing practices, including greater automation, shift-left testing, continuous quality and the adoption of AI within testing processes.

The Role

You will act as a senior quality authority across major initiatives, Epics and Releases, providing both strategic direction and hands‑on orchestration across complex testing programmes.

Key responsibilities include:

• Owning and continuously improving the Test Strategy
• Producing Epic Release & Test Strategies, including approach, plans and estimates
• Leading testing across multiple Agile squads and complex system dependencies
• Coordinating end‑to‑end and cross‑squad testing
• Defining and governing functional, non‑functional and automation testing approaches
• Driving adoption of automation, shift‑left and continuous testing
• Supporting the introduction of AI‑enabled testing practices
• Ensuring appropriate test environments, data and tooling are available
• Establishing and governing testing quality gates, entry and exit criteria
• Providing quality assessments and recommendations for Go/No‑Go decisions
• Coaching Test Engineers, Feature Test Owners and wider engineering teams
• Driving continuous improvement in testing effectiveness, predictability and quality

Non‑Functional Testing

You will define and coordinate the testing approach across areas including:

• Performance and volume testing
• Resilience and recovery testing
• Security testing
• Operational readiness testing

You will work closely with infrastructure, engineering and architecture teams to ensure platforms and releases are ready for production.

Release & Acceptance

• You will orchestrate Release Regression and Exploratory Testing across participating squads and support Release Acceptance Testing alongside Release Engineering.
• You will ensure testing controls and quality gates are understood, measurable and consistently applied, while maintaining the right balance between strong governance and Agile delivery.

Stakeholder Leadership

This is a highly visible role requiring someone comfortable operating across both technology and business teams.

You will:

• Provide clear reporting across testing progress, quality, risks, issues and defects
• Present test strategies and quality assessments to senior stakeholders
• Escalate material risks and delivery concerns
• Influence engineering and delivery teams without becoming a bottleneck
• Build a strong quality engineering culture across geographically dispersed teams

What We're Looking For

You will bring extensive experience across Software Testing, Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering, ideally gained within Financial Services or another highly regulated environment.

We are particularly interested in experience of:

• Leading testing across multiple Agile teams or squads
• Creating and governing enterprise or programme‑level Test Strategies
• Coordinating complex end‑to‑end testing across multiple systems
• Managing testing risks, dependencies and quality reporting
• Agile, Scrum and DevOps delivery models
• Test automation frameworks and continuous testing
• CI/CD pipelines and automated quality gates
• SQL
• Cloud‑native and microservices architectures
• Working with senior technology and business stakeholders
• Experience leading test transformation or modernisation , particularly involving automation or AI‑enabled testing, would be highly valuable.

About You

You are a strategic thinker who can move comfortably between high‑level quality strategy and the realities of delivery.

You will be:

• A strong communicator and credible senior stakeholder
• Collaborative, pragmatic and delivery‑focused
• Comfortable challenging constructively when quality is at risk
• Able to balance governance and control with Agile delivery
• Analytical and confident working through complex dependencies
• Passionate about improving engineering and testing practices
• Comfortable coaching and developing testing capability across teams

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role will be reflected through:

• Higher‑quality releases
• Reduced production defects and incidents
• Greater predictability across testing and releases
• Successful Release Acceptance and Regression Testing
• Increased adoption of automation and modern Quality Engineering practices
• Strong stakeholder confidence in release quality
• Continuous improvement of testing standards, processes and controls

This is an opportunity for an experienced Lead Test Engineer to have genuine influence across a complex technology environment, shaping not only how testing is delivered today but how the organisation evolves its Quality Engineering capability for the future.