Overview
In this role you will lead a Quality Engineering function at scale, steering AI-assisted automation and test data capability to improve delivery quality. You will own programme-level quality and release governance, aligning with client SLAs and strategic objectives. You’ll drive a transformation from manual QA to risk-based, AI-enabled practices and build a cross-domain QA operating model. The position offers the chance to shape tooling standards, governance, and a high-impact quality culture across multiple streams.
Pay / Benefits
- Pension Scheme
- Discretionary Bonus Scheme
- Private Medical Insurance + Virtual GP
- Life Assurance
- 26 days holiday
- Personal Learning Budget
Responsibilities
- Shape and evolve the overall quality strategy across delivery streams to meet objectives and SLAs
- Define and maintain release governance with readiness criteria, risk acceptance, and sign-off authority
- Lead and codify standard domain-level test strategies and coverage expectations for QA leads
- Govern defect management at programme level, ensuring SLA compliance for internal and client-facing metrics
- Lead a team of engineers building bespoke automation tooling using AI and LLM capabilities
- Own test data management strategy, including AI-assisted synthetic data and environment data integrity
- Evaluate and select off-the-shelf AI testing tools and establish governance for their use
- Maintain governance gates as AI participation in PDLC grows, ensuring human accountability for risk decisions
- Set tooling standards across domains to avoid central bottlenecks
- Develop QA leads and define operating model and career framework for the function
- Drive change management to shift QA practices toward intelligent, risk-based quality engineering
- Upskill teams in AI tooling, context engineering, and agent-assisted workflows
- Communicate quality outcomes in business terms to senior stakeholders
- Own end-to-end release quality processes, including environment strategy, regression coverage, go/no-go decisions, and post-release monitoring
- Embed shift-left quality gates and balance delivery velocity with release stability
Key requirements
- Proven leadership of a QA or quality engineering function at significant scale with embedded domain leads
- Direct management of engineers building tooling or automation infrastructure
- Experience delivering a meaningful QA transformation (AI adoption, automation uplift, governance overhaul)
- Experience in multi-client or multi-product environments with quality outcomes across concurrent streams
- Ownership of release governance in complex multi-stream contexts (go/no-go accountability)
- Exposure to energy, utilities, billing, or similarly regulated domains is a plus
- Strong grounding in test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration
- Working knowledge of LLMs and AI tooling in QA (test generation, defect triage, coverage)
- Understanding of test data management and environment data integrity at scale
- Ability to evaluate build vs. buy for tooling and assess AI testing platforms
- Comfort with programme-level stakeholder communication and accountability
- Experience leading distributed, multi-timezone quality functions
- Strong communication skills translating quality metrics into business outcomes
- Experience leading practice transformation in engineering contexts
- Ability to lead through ambiguity and manage change
- Strong communication and storytelling to business leaders
- Change management and stakeholder alignment
- Collaborative leadership across domains and time zones
- AI tooling and LLM capabilities in QA
- Automation tooling development and maintenance
- Test data management and synthetic data generation
Director, Quality & Release Engineering in London employer: Kaluza
Kaluza is an exceptional employer, offering a dynamic work environment in London that fosters innovation and collaboration within the energy sector. With a strong commitment to employee growth, Kaluza provides a range of benefits including a personal learning budget, flexible holiday options, and a progressive leave policy, ensuring that team members can thrive both personally and professionally. The company's focus on diversity and merit-based talent recognition makes it an attractive place for those seeking meaningful and rewarding careers in business development.
