Head of Quality Engineering

Head of Quality Engineering

Full-Time 80000 - 100000 £ / year (est.) Home office (partial)
Lendable

At a Glance

  • Tasks: Lead quality engineering efforts and innovate with AI to enhance testing processes.
  • Company: Join one of the UK's fastest-growing fintech companies, backed by top investors.
  • Benefits: Enjoy flexible working, health coverage, and a fully stocked kitchen.
  • Other info: Fast-paced environment with high autonomy and excellent career growth opportunities.
  • Why this job: Make a real impact on millions of customers while shaping the future of quality engineering.
  • Qualifications: 7+ years in quality roles, hands-on testing experience, and team management skills.

The predicted salary is between 80000 - 100000 £ per year.

About Lendable

Lendable is on a mission to build the world’s best technology to help people get credit and save money. We’re building one of the world’s leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

  • One of the UK’s newest unicorns with a team of just over 700 people
  • Among the fastest‑growing tech companies in the UK
  • Profitable since 2017
  • Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs
  • Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9 across 10,000s of reviews on Trustpilot)

So far, we’ve rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days. We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do: we’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions worth of financial products are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes.

Join us if you want to:

  • Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1.
  • Work in small teams of exceptional people, who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo.
  • Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting.

About The Role

Quality at Lendable is a team‑level responsibility with participation from PMs, EMs and engineers to ensure the right guardrails are in place to deliver quality software. We aggressively automate across the whole test pyramid and only manually test where absolutely necessary. We’re hiring a Head of Quality to be accountable for engineering quality across the organisation, while local responsibility for delivering quality stays with each team. As we grow in headcount and customer numbers, this role keeps the bar high by taking signals from our existing quality processes, evolving our quality gates, and enabling teams rather than gatekeeping them. It is a hands‑on role with a managerial aspect. The role will take the lead on using AI in the quality process, innovating with LLMs to improve efficiency and accuracy of testing.

What good looks like: in your first 12 months:

  • Reduction in incident rate per PR.
  • SLO coverage across services meaningfully increases.
  • Introduction of effective AI‑assisted quality tooling in the SDLC.
  • Effective risk based quality reporting on quality.

What You'll Be Doing

  • Own the engineering quality of the organisation.
  • Monitor and report on SLO performance.
  • Engage teams to mature their SLO definitions.
  • Introduce systematic performance testing in the SDLC.
  • Ensure initiatives to improve SLO performance are completed.

Incidents:

  • Own the follow‑ups and resolutions from the incident process across engineering.
  • Ensure follow ups from incidents are completed.
  • Identify hotspots, catalogue and evaluate risks and recommend remediations.

How You'll Do This

Being Hands‑on: This is not a pure managerial role. You will be engaging with teams, innovating with testing solutions and contributing code to test frameworks and CI pipelines.

Managing a team:

  • Hiring and managing a team of 2 Quality Engineers, they will be new hires to the company.
  • Deploying Quality Engineers into engineering teams to help them improve their quality.
  • Managing and supporting individuals that are embedded into different teams across the organisation.

Driving a Quality Mindset:

  • Evangelising quality across the organisation.
  • Work with MDs and other senior stakeholders to identify and create solutions to their quality challenges.
  • Embedding quality thinking into all phases of the SDLC, not just the testing part.
  • Looking for opportunities to shift‑left the testing practices.
  • Forming a guild of Quality representatives across the organisation.

Running Initiatives:

  • Scoping and inserting quality initiatives onto teams roadmaps.
  • Championing these initiatives with senior stakeholders.

Developing the use of AI into the quality process:

  • Bring tools and processes into the organisation to level‑up our testing efficiency using AI.
  • AI testing agents, AI test failure triage agents and AI observers for production environments.

Tech stacks you will be working with:

  • Backend Coding: PHP, Kotlin, GO, Python
  • Frontend Coding: Typescript, React, React Native, GraphQL, Relay
  • Testing: PHPUnit, Behat, JUnit, Kotest, Jest, Maestro, K6
  • Observability: Datadog, Sentry, Incident.io, Grafana
  • Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ
  • Deployment: Argo, Github, Github Actions

Essential What we're looking for:

  • At least 7 years in quality related roles.
  • Run a number of QA initiatives across an organisation to improve the quality output across engineering teams.
  • Proven senior stakeholder management.
  • Experience working with quality across the stack.
  • You have hands‑on experience of testing backends and frontends.
  • From functional to unit, performance and accessibility testing.
  • Have line managed a small team.
  • Worked with B2C products at scale (millions of users).
  • Experience shaping CI/CD pipelines for test reliability (GitHub Actions or similar), including flakiness reduction, parallelisation, artefact management, and runtime control.
  • Have shipped AI tooling into a quality process — this can be as simple as evaluating, buying and rolling out an off‑the‑shelf AI testing tool, through to building bespoke agents.
  • You can describe the impact it had on how teams worked.
  • Proactive, low‑ego, and clear communicator, able to chase things down when blocked.

Nice to Have:

  • Experience with using Datadog, Sentry or similar for monitoring.
  • Experience with incident.io or similar incident process.
  • Have managed SLOs and used them to improve quality.
  • Experience in financial services or other regulated B2C environments.
  • Mobile app testing experience (e.g. Maestro, native iOS/Android, React Native).

Why join?

  • See your work matter: Our products are used by millions of customers. Improving quality ensures issues and outages don’t affect a large population across continents. Quality issues also have a direct impact on company revenue. As we scale further, quality plays a big part in our growth.
  • High autonomy: You will decide where and how to engage across the organisation to improve quality. You will hire a team of Quality Engineers to deploy into teams.
  • Work at the frontier of AI: AI tooling for quality is moving fast. You'll be one of the people deciding how we apply it - what's useful, what isn't, and where to have humans in the loop.
  • An organisation that ships: No layers, no theatre, fast decisions. A fast moving environment that has made the company successful.

Interview process:

  • Screening Call with the Talent Team
  • Hiring Manager Call
  • VP of Engineering Call
  • Technical Interview
  • Final stage with our CTO

Life at Lendable:

  • Winning team: the opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies.
  • Flexible working: flexible approach tailored to each role. Hybrid roles require three days in‑office weekly; fully remote roles include regular opportunities for in‑person connection through socials and off‑sites.
  • Socials & connection: opportunities and events to come together, socialise, and get to know each other beyond the office walls.
  • Health coverage: support for your physical and mental wellbeing, including private health cover.
  • Retirement & savings: long‑term financial wellbeing through retirement savings plans.
  • Employee referral programme: earn a competitive bonus when you refer successful new team members.
  • Office meals & snacks: enjoy a fully stocked kitchen, plus complimentary lunches prepared by in‑house chefs on in‑office days at select locations.
  • Sustainable commuting: cycle‑to‑work and electric vehicle salary sacrifice schemes available in select locations.

Please note: The availability and details of specific benefits vary by location and role. For more information, please speak to your Talent Partner.

Head of Quality Engineering employer: Lendable

Lendable is an exceptional employer that champions innovation and flexibility, making it an ideal place for a Senior Kotlin/JVM Engineer to thrive. With a vibrant work culture that prioritises collaboration and personal growth, employees are encouraged to develop their skills while contributing to impactful financial products. The company's commitment to flexible working arrangements further enhances the work-life balance, making it a rewarding environment for those looking to make a difference in the fintech space.

Lendable

Contact Details:

Lendable Recruitment Team

StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫

We think this is how you could land Head of Quality Engineering

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Contribute to Open Source Projects

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We think you need these skills to ace Head of Quality Engineering

Quality Assurance
AI Integration in Quality Processes
Service Level Objectives (SLO) Management
Incident Management
Performance Testing
Hands-on Testing Experience
Team Management

Some tips for your application 🫡

Show off your coding skills:When applying for a software engineering role, it's super important to showcase your coding skills. Make sure your CV includes your tech stack, any relevant programming languages you’re comfortable with, and examples of projects you've worked on. If you have a GitHub profile, link it up! We love to see code in action.

Tailor your portfolio:For a full-time role, we’d expect to see some solid examples of your work in your portfolio. Make sure to include at least two or three projects that highlight your problem-solving skills and your ability to work with different technologies. Focus on the projects that are most relevant to the position at Lendable.

Craft a killer cover letter:Your cover letter is your chance to stand out—make it personal! Explain why you want to work at Lendable and how your skills align with the role. Show us your passion for software development. We dig enthusiastic candidates who understand the value of collaboration and continuous learning!

Be clear and concise:When it comes to writing your CV and cover letter, clarity is key. Avoid jargon that could confuse us and stick to simple, direct language. Highlight your achievements with quantifiable results where possible, and keep everything easy to read. A well-organised application goes a long way!

How to prepare for a job interview at Lendable

Brush Up on Your Coding Skills

For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.

Know Your Tools and Frameworks

Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If Lendable uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.

Showcase Your Projects

Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.

Prepare for Behavioural Questions

While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.