Head of Automation QA

About the role

A senior quality leadership position responsible for defining and enforcing the organisation’s quality assurance strategy across all engineering streams. The role owns test architecture, automation direction and release confidence while building a high‑performing Automation QA function.

Key responsibilities

• Drive high-quality strategy across products, platforms, and delivery streams.
• Establish automation as the default quality approach across UI, API, integration, regression, and non‑functional testing.
• Lead adoption of AI‑enabled quality engineering practices to improve efficiency, coverage and defect detection.
• Own the quality engineering framework, including automation tooling, test architecture, CI/CD integration, reporting and quality gates.
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI and intelligent tooling for test optimisation and root‑cause analysis.
• Drive release confidence through measurable quality indicators such as defect leakage, automation coverage and flaky‑test reduction.
• Partner with Engineering, Product and Scrum teams to embed quality throughout the SDLC.
• Define and enforce test design standards, automation coding practices and maintainability principles.
• Lead the AQA team, standardise practices, establish reporting and coach capability.
• Own test environment readiness, test data strategy and integration reliability for automated execution.

Required profile

• 10+ years of software quality assurance or engineering experience, with at least 3 years in a lead or head‑of‑function role.
• Proven track record building and scaling automation frameworks in high‑concurrency, high‑availability environments.
• Strong background in regulated, fast‑paced sectors such as FinTech, Payments, Crypto, Brokerage or Trading.
• Deep understanding of modern software architectures including microservices, distributed systems, APIs and event‑driven design.
• Experience defining automation strategy across frontend, backend, integration and end‑to‑end testing.

Required skills

• Python programming.
• Selenium WebDriver.
• Behaviour‑Driven Development frameworks (Behave or Cucumber).
• Kubernetes.
• Kafka.
• CI/CD integration and test automation tooling.