QA Manager and Automation Lead

Role Overview

QA Manager and Automation Lead for a major insurance sector client.

Responsibilities

• Define, implement and operate the Quality Engineering (QE) model for the project, combining functional leadership and hands‑on technical automation, quality gates and CI/CD.
• Serve as the sole quality reference for the Customer and Prime Contractor (Kyndryl), ensuring end‑to‑end, automated, governed, and measurable testing and code quality.
• Lead the QA Governance and roadmap, define and evolve the global quality strategy aligned with the client’s SDLC, and set and govern the Definition of Done (DoD) for testing and quality, covering Integration/API, UI, performance, accessibility and smoke.
• Design and run the quality gates model in CI/CD (pre‑merge, pre‑deploy and post‑deploy), including thresholds by criticality, governed exception mechanisms and traceability.
• Manage risks, dependencies and blockers (access, environments, licenses, runners, mainframe windows).
• Primary liaison with Customer / Prime Contractor, Architecture, Security, DevSecOps and CI/CD Platform teams.
• Provide executive and operational reporting, track quality KPIs, provide evolution plans and support audit and compliance.
• Automation Engineer / Lead SDET responsibilities: define and build automation frameworks aligned with the project (integration/API testing, UI automation with Selenium/Playwright/Cypress, post‑deployment smoke tests).
• Participate in design of test suites, refactorization/ stabilisation of flaky tests, and risk‑based test selection criteria.
• Integrate and optimise automation within CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins/GitLab) – parallelisation, sharding, caching, evidence management (JUnit XML, coverage, SARIF).
• Collaborate on static analysis (Kiuwan/SonarQube/Fortify) and on building dashboards of quality (Grafana/Power BI) with executive and operational KPIs.
• Mentor and technically support development teams – enablement and best practices.

Qualifications

• More than 8 years of experience in QA / Testing / Quality Engineering.
• 3 to 5 years leading teams or initiatives for QA and Automation model implementation.
• Experience in enterprise projects, especially banking or insurance.
• Experience in DevOps/CI‑CD transformation, end‑to‑end automation and quality gates.
• Ability to operate over a heterogeneous technology ecosystem.

Technical Scope

• Languages / Platforms (mandatory): Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python.
• Automation API: REST Assured, SuperTest, Pact, Postman/Newman.
• UI: Playwright, Cypress, Selenium 4.
• CI/CD and DevOps: Jenkins, GitLab.

Desirable

• Basic code quality knowledge – Kiuwan baseline, SonarQube, Fortify.
• Security scanning tools – OWASP, Snyk.
• Observability and reporting – Grafana, Power BI.
• Integration with CM, quality tools and repositories.

Competencies – Technical

• Advanced Quality Engineering expertise and basic DevSecOps experience.
• Strong background in testing methodologies and tools.
• Solid automation and CI/CD skills.
• Capacity to design scalable, governed QE architectures.
• Experience in regulated enterprise environments.

Competencies – Leadership

• Technical leadership with hands‑on capability.
• Stakeholder management – technical and business.
• Metric orientation, results focus, continuous improvement.
• Clear and structured communication to clients and committees.

Benefits

• 23 working days of vacation, plus fixed holidays on 24 and 31 December.
• Comprehensive benefits: medical insurance, telework support, life and accident insurance.
• Flexible remuneration program (meal card, childcare voucher, transport card, online English courses, family medical coverage).
• Free access to learning platforms.
• Career stability and professional growth.
• Internal referral compensation plan.
• Choice between 12 or 14 payment installments.
• Work‑life balance measures – flexible hours, telework, specialist support, intensive Saturdays, and summer schedule per project.
• UST Club with discounts on gyms and other services.

Equal Opportunity Statement

UST is committed to equal opportunity in its selection processes and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, disability, age, religion, sexual orientation or nationality. We actively work to incorporate people with disability certifications.

Skills

• quality assurance, java, javascript, jenkins, gitlab, kiuwan, fortify