Head of Automated Quality Assurance (AQA)

We are seeking on behalf of our client, a leading payment company, a highly experienced and strategic Head of Automated Quality Assurance (AQA) to lead and elevate the organisation's end-to-end quality assurance function across all engineering streams. The role encompasses defining test architecture and automation strategy, setting and enforcing quality standards, driving release confidence, and building a high-performing AQA team that ensures scalable, reliable, and compliant software delivery within a fast-paced, regulated payments environment.

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.

• Drive adoption of AI-enabled quality engineering practices to improve efficiency, productivity, test coverage, and defect detection across the testing lifecycle.

• 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 to optimise test coverage, improve root cause analysis, support risk-based testing, and reduce manual effort.

•  Drive release confidence through measurable quality indicators, including defect leakage, automation coverage, flaky test reduction, execution stability, and production incident trends.

• Partner with Engineering, Product and Scrum to embed quality throughout the SDLC, from requirement refinement through production validation.

•  Define and enforce test design standards, automation coding practices, maintainability principles, and quality gates across the AQA team.

• Lead the AQA team: standardise practices, establish reporting, and coach AQA capability.

• Own test environment readiness, test data strategy, and integration reliability required for consistent automated execution.

• Drive continuous improvement in quality processes, release readiness, defect prevention, root cause analysis, and feedback loops from production issues.

• Provide leadership reporting on quality health, delivery risk, release readiness, and productivity improvement opportunities.

• Support compliance and audit readiness by ensuring traceability between requirements, test coverage, defects, and release evidence.

Qualifications & Skills:

• 10+ years in software quality assurance or quality engineering, with 3+ years in a lead, principal, or head-of-function role.

• Proven experience building and scaling automation frameworks and quality processes in high-concurrency, high-availability environments.

• Strong background in regulated, fast-paced environments such as Fintech, Payments, Crypto, Brokerage, or Trading.

• Solid understanding of SDLC, release management, and quality governance.

• Deep understanding of modern software architectures, including microservices, distributed systems, APIs, and event-driven design.

• Hands-on experience defining automation strategy across frontend, backend, integration, and end-to-end testing.

• Experience introducing modern engineering tooling, including AI-assisted approaches, to improve efficiency and quality outcomes.

• Strong understanding of CI/CD integration, test strategy, defect lifecycle management, and quality metrics.

• Knowledge of performance, resilience, and reliability testing principles.

• Familiarity with technologies such as Kubernetes, Kafka, and relational/document data models.

• Skilled in leadership reporting, stakeholder management, people development, and driving quality accountability across teams.

• Strong programming skills in Python

• Hands-on experience with Selenium WebDriver and BDD frameworks (Behave/Cucumber)

• Bachelor’s/Master’s degree preferred.