Consultant, Quality Assurance Engineering - Test Management

Department Overview

As Consultant, Quality Assurance Engineering you will be accountable for our testing environments both physical and virtual, including the onsite test lab in East Finchley and offshore labs in India. You will have creative autonomy to deliver seamless deployment of new technology, ensuring production restaurants mimic testing environments as closely as possible. You will drive automation, collaborate across teams to reduce defect leakage and incidents, and champion quality improvements throughout the restaurant estate. You will also manage and develop a Tech Business Analyst, ensuring alignment between technical quality and business requirements. A key part of your role is to manage the relationship and performance of our testing partners, ensuring high standards and continuous improvement. 

Duties

Testing Environment Management: 

Accountable for on-site and offshore test labs, ensuring alignment with production environments. 

Responsible for lab setup, configuration, hardware procurement, and software versioning. 

Automation Leadership: 

Drive adoption and continuous improvement of test automation frameworks and tools. 

Set and monitor automation targets, reporting progress and impact on defect detection rates and deployment speed. 

Champion automation best practices, mentoring team members and stakeholders. 

Defect Leakage & Incident Reduction: 

Collaborate with DevOps, Deployment, Restaurant Operations, and the Software Management pillar to identify and address defect leakage. 

Lead defect triage sessions with cross-functional teams, ensuring rapid resolution and knowledge sharing. 

Develop dashboards tracking defect leakage, incident rates, and issue resolution times across restaurant deployments. 

Analyse incident trends, proactively address systemic issues, and drive down overall incident rates. 

Implement post-deployment reviews and retrospectives to capture lessons learned and drive improvements. 

Cross-Team Collaboration: 

Align UK Test function to Global testing strategy, sharing best practices and resources. 

Establish feedback loops with restaurant teams and franchisees to capture real-world issues and inform continuous improvement. 

Facilitate workshops and training for stakeholders, building quality awareness and empowering proactive issue identification. 

Continuous Improvement & Metrics: 

Define and track KPIs related to automation coverage, defect leakage, and incident reduction. 

Benchmark against industry standards and internal targets, regularly reviewing progress and adjusting plans. 

Seek opportunities for continual improvement, leveraging external best practices. 

Stakeholder Engagement: 

Lead and attend multi-functional team meetings, contributing to strategic planning and quality initiatives. 

Represent Quality Assurance in forums, ensuring quality and automation are embedded in all technology initiatives. 

Managed Test Service & Partner Management: 

Lead the Managed test service and oversee execution and compliance of the Managed Service Testing contract. 

Manage the relationship and performance of testing partner, ensuring delivery to agreed standards and driving continuous improvement. 

Team Leadership: 

Manage, coach, and develop the Tech Business Analyst & R2CB talent, fostering collaboration between technical and business analysis functions. 

Ensure the Tech Business Analyst is integrated into quality and deployment processes, supporting requirements gathering, process improvement, and stakeholder communication. 

Qualifications

• Proven success in leading and coaching teams, including both QA and Business Analyst roles.
• Previous test or QA experience, especially around environment management, configuration, and automation.
• Experience setting up pilot programs using test environments.
• Strong communication, organisational, and dependency management skills.
• Project management experience (Agile or Waterfall).
• Advanced proficiency in Jira and Confluence, including the use of testing add-ons such as Zephyr Scale for test management, reporting, and traceability.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced, changing environment.
• Experience identifying and using external best practices for deployment solutions.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and curiosity to explore new ways of working.
• Leadership behaviours and a desire to develop self and others.
• Ability to think outside the box to support frequent and smooth deployments.
• Strong presence and ability to influence at senior levels.
• Experience collaborating with Business Analysts to translate business requirements into technical solutions and quality improvements.
• Experience managing relationships and performance of external testing partner