QualityEngineeringLead

**ABOUT THE ROLE** A lot of teams have been told to "shift left" and have taken it to mean one thing: hand the entire testing pyramid to the developers and hope for the best. The result is familiar. Thin or non-existent QA support, unit tests written to satisfy a coverage gate rather than catch anything, brittle end-to-end suites nobody trusts, and CI pipelines that get slower and more expensive every quarter with nobody tending them. Our clients keep asking us for the same thing: a senior quality mind who can come in, work alongside their engineers, and genuinely change how the team thinks about quality. Not someone to write all the tests for them, someone who makes the whole team better at owning them. That is this role. You will embed with a client, often working across more than one of their development teams, and raise the quality bar from the inside: at the whiteboard before any code is written, in the test suites at every level of the pyramid, and in the pipelines that ship the work. You lead the quality discipline through influence, mentoring, and worked examples, not by taking the testing off anyone's plate. **Requirements** **WHAT YOU'LL DO** \- Shift quality left, properly. Help teams catch defects at the cheapest possible moment: during refinement and task definition, before a line of code exists. Join story-writing and design discussions, ask the questions that surface ambiguity and edge cases early, and coach teams to build testability and clear acceptance criteria into the work from the start. \- Lift the whole testing pyramid. Work with developers across the full range, from unit and integration tests through to end-to-end and system testing. Help them write tests that are fast, deterministic, and worth trusting; rebalance suites that are top-heavy or flaky; and establish what to test at each level, and why. \- Make pipelines fast and cheap. Treat CI as a product. Profile and optimise pipeline definitions, cut wasted compute, parallelise and shard te