QA Lead Engineer at Nando's UK & IRE, London Area, £Contract Rate

QA Lead Engineer (Contract)

Overall Ambition

Drive a high-quality engineering culture by leading QA across the Stock and ABP teams, implementing best practices, and ensuring teams deliver with confidence and speed. Define and champion a unified QA strategy, automation frameworks, and knowledge-sharing initiatives across the department.

The Role

As a QA Lead Contractor, you will work closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to establish scalable testing processes, define quality standards, and ensure robust automation practices. You will be the go-to expert for testing strategies, automation tools, and best practices while fostering a culture of ownership and accountability.

Key Responsibilities

• QA Strategy & Governance: Define and maintain a clear testing strategy that aligns with engineering and business needs.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work with engineering leads, product managers, and stakeholders to embed testing as a key part of the development lifecycle.
• Automation & Tooling: Select, implement, and scale automation frameworks, ensuring efficiency and reliability.
• Knowledge Sharing: Conduct training sessions and document best practices to improve QA awareness across all teams.
• Continuous Improvement: Track and analyze testing metrics, drive process improvements, and reduce testing bottlenecks.
• Testing Ownership: Empower engineers to take responsibility for their testing while ensuring a robust safety net through automation.
• Risk-Based Testing: Introduce a structured approach where test coverage is aligned with business impact and risk.
• Incident Management: Implement a structured approach for post-release monitoring, bug triaging, and root cause analysis.

Tools & Frameworks

The QA Lead Contractor will oversee and enhance the usage of our existing tools, ensuring they support a scalable and effective testing strategy and introduce new ones.

Skills & Experience

• Extensive experience in QA leadership, driving automation strategies and setting up scalable testing frameworks.
• Strong background in test automation, including tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, TestContainers, and Checkly.
• Deep understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred).
• Strong programming experience in JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python for test automation.
• Experience working with observability tools (e.g., monitoring logs, distributed tracing, and alerting mechanisms).
• Ability to define and track key quality metrics to measure and continuously improve the testing process.
• Security and compliance awareness, ensuring testing processes align with least privilege access and automated secrets management.
• Experience with Stock & Finance Systems or ABP (Accounting, Banking, and Property) Teams is a plus.

Why Join Us?

As a QA Lead Contractor, you will drive the department’s testing strategy, improve automation coverage, and establish a culture of quality and ownership. If you have deep technical expertise, thrive on collaboration, and want to shape the future of testing, we’d love to hear from you.