Head of Quality Assurance & Management

Role Summary

Lead company-wide quality governance across Quality Management, Quality Assurance and Quality Control, ensuring engineering products are reliable, compliant, certifiable and market-ready.

The role owns the Quality Management System (QMS), quality standards, governance, metrics and risk, while directly leading QA process assurance and overseeing QC through the Senior Manager of Application Testing.

The successful candidate must be both strategic and hands-on—able to translate technical quality risks into business impact while driving quality across requirements, design, development, testing and release.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and continuously improve the company-wide QMS, quality standards, policies and quality gates.
• Define QA controls, checkpoints and Definitions of Done across the SDLC.
• Drive defect prevention, root cause analysis, process improvement and upstream quality.
• Oversee Application Testing, including test coverage, automation, non-functional testing and defect management.
• Establish and maintain release, change and emergency change governance.
• Embed quality gates into CI/CD pipelines and ensure consistent compliance.
• Define governance for AI-generated code and AI-powered product testing, including evaluation, regression and safety controls.
• Own quality metrics, dashboards, reporting, budget, tooling and vendor management.
• Report quality risks and business impact to Senior Leadership.
• Lead and develop the quality organisation across QA, testing and automation.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Design, Security and Support to embed quality throughout the development lifecycle.

Experience & Requirements

Essential:

• 12+ years of software engineering and quality experience, preferably in distributed/cloud-native systems.
• 6+ years in senior technology/QA leadership, managing teams of approximately 50 through leads and functional heads.
• Proven ownership of a company-wide QMS or quality governance framework.
• Strong experience in QA process assurance, quality gates, change control and release governance.
• Strong knowledge of defect prevention, RCA, phase containment and quality improvement.
• Technical understanding of test automation, CI/CD and modern software architecture.
• Experience with quality metrics and executive-level reporting.
• Strong communication, influencing and stakeholder-management skills.
• Comfortable working in Agile/DevOps environments with frequent releases.

Desirable:

• 3–5 years in high-transaction / real-time financial technology.
• Experience with Playwright, Cypress, REST Assured, k6, JMeter or Gatling.
• Knowledge of accessibility, contract testing and shift-left security.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering and LLM-based code generation.
• Experience with AWS, microservices and cloud-native platforms.
• Knowledge of observability and production telemetry.

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a quantitative field.
• Relevant certifications such as ISTQB Expert, Six Sigma Black Belt, ISO 9001 Lead Auditor, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, CISSP/CISM or TOGAF.