QA Engineering People Manager - Product team in London

Aker Systems was founded in 2017 by a team of experienced technology professionals who recognised an opportunity to provide highly secure enterprise data platforms to large organisations. We build and operate ground‐breaking, ultra‐secure, high‐performance, cloud‐based data infrastructure for the enterprise. Our proprietary technology solutions drive performance and reduce costs while helping our clients to improve the management and sharing of data across their organisations.

In 2024, Aker Systems won the Breakthrough Culture Awards highlighting growth companies putting culture first. In 2020 Aker Systems was recognised as a 'One to Watch' on the Sunday Times Tech Track. The Company was also recognised at the Thames Valley Tech Awards 2020; winning the Thames Valley Tech Company of the year, the Emerging Tech Company and High Growth Tech Business categories. We encourage people of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. We are committed to maintaining an inclusive, and supportive place for you to do your very best work.

We are seeking a QA Engineering People Manager to drive and evolve our quality engineering strategy across our highly secure, cloud‐native platform. Operating at the intersection of security, scalability, and performance, you'll work within the Product & Innovation team—collaborating closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and Architects to ensure built‐in quality from concept to deployment. You will champion Behaviour‐Driven Development (BDD), lead the development of automated test frameworks, and guide teams in testing distributed, event‐driven architectures deployed on AWS, Azure, and GCP. If you're passionate about combining hands‐on QA engineering with technical leadership in a highly secure, mission‐critical environment, this is your role.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the end‐to‐end QA strategy across frontend, backend, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Champion BDD practices, enabling teams to define and automate executable specifications using Gherkin/Cucumber in Kotlin/Java.
• Build and maintain automated test frameworks that support microservices and Kafka‐based event‐driven systems.
• Lead frontend testing using Playwright, ensuring a seamless and secure user experience.
• Shape performance, load, and resilience testing strategies for distributed and containerised services.
• Integrate automated tests within CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes, and modern DevOps workflows.
• Mentor and coach QA engineers to create a culture of ownership, accountability, and quality‐first thinking.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and Architecture to drive testability into design.
• Manage a team of QA Engineers with responsibilities including performance coaching and management, engagement and team building.
• Provide constructive and real‐time feedback to your direct reports through goal setting, regular 1:1s, personal development conversations and annual appraisals.
• Drive engagement, productivity and motivation through your team by analysing, discussing and acting on insights from the employee engagement survey specific to your area.
• Successfully onboard and train new hires, complete probation milestones and processes, create robust inductions and provide career development support and guidance.

Tech Stack & Environment

• Languages/Frameworks: Kotlin, Java, Spring Boot.
• Frontend: React, tested with Playwright.
• Test Automation: Custom BDD frameworks in Kotlin/Java.
• Cloud Platforms: AWS (Azure and GCP also in use).
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins.

What We're Looking For

Must‐Haves:

• Significant experience as a Lead QA Engineer in a product or platform engineering team.
• Deep expertise in BDD and writing executable specifications (feature files, scenarios).
• Proven hands‐on experience in automating test suites using Kotlin or Java.
• Comfortable testing both frontend UI and backend services/APIs.
• Strong exposure to Kafka and asynchronous/event‐driven architectures.
• Solid understanding of cloud‐native systems, containerisation, and CI/CD best practices.
• Strong communication and leadership skills—able to influence quality culture across teams.
• Analytical mindset with a passion for system resilience, test coverage, and early defect detection.

Nice‐to‐Haves:

• Experience in regulated environments (BFSI, healthcare, telecom, public sector).
• Familiarity with contract testing, chaos testing, or service virtualization.
• Knowledge of security testing practices for cloud environments.
• Contributions to open‐source test tooling or frameworks.

Mindset & Culture Fit

Our team believes that quality is a product, not a phase. We're looking for someone who:

• Brings a builder's mindset to quality—not just finding defects, but preventing them early.
• Thrives in complex, ambiguous environments and builds structure with clarity.
• Is collaborative by nature, but unafraid to challenge assumptions.
• Has the resilience and adaptability to work across multi‐cloud, high‐assurance systems.
• Believes in continuous learning, both as an individual and for the team.

Aker Systems Attributes

At Aker we work as a team; we are collaborative, hardworking, open, and delivery obsessed. There is no blame culture here: try things, and take responsibility for the outcomes. You are always part of the wider Aker. We help our colleagues and take pride in successfully achieving difficult tasks. We run towards problems and help to solve them. Communicate always, do so accurately and in a timely fashion.

In return, we offer a competitive salary, 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, company paid medical insurance and life assurance, pension scheme, annual training allowance, wellbeing allowance, virtual GP, Employee Assistance plan and more.

Aker Systems fosters a diverse environment that encourages openness in its communications and is committed to providing equal employment opportunity for all people regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation, age, marital status, national origin, citizenship status, disability, veteran status or other personal characteristics. We embrace differences of opinion and diversity because they help challenge us and find new groundbreaking technical solutions.