QA Lead: AI‑Powered Testing & Quality Strategy in Manchester

We're the team behind the AI-powered customer engagement platform that's transforming how businesses connect with their customers - turning every conversation into a revenue-driving moment. Our platform helps contact centre teams achieve their goals through intelligent automation, predictive insights, and seamless customer experiences. We build technology that empowers people, not replaces them.

We are proud of our reputation for combining cutting-edge tech with down-to-earth people, we have big ambitions and a clear sense of who we are. Our culture is driven by our values: we take ownership, move fast, challenge the status quo, and learn constantly. Working at MaxContact means being stretched, you'll be trusted with responsibility early, expected to think commercially, and encouraged to act decisively. We don't stand still, and neither will you.

At the same time, we believe high performance only works in a safe, supportive environment. You'll be surrounded by smart, driven people who want to see you succeed, who value openness and honesty, and who see mistakes as part of learning quickly and getting better.

We're builders, problem-solvers, and customer champions who believe in innovation with purpose, human-first technology, and delivering results that matter. You'll work alongside passionate colleagues building technology that directly impacts how thousands of businesses connect with millions of customers every day. If you're ambitious, curious, and excited by the idea of building something meaningful in a fast-moving tech business.

As QA Lead at MaxContact, you will be accountable for defining, owning, and continuously improving our overall quality assurance strategy across the mission-critical CCaaS platform, AI Agents, and Conversation Analytics products.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end quality assurance strategy across CCaaS and supporting products, covering test planning, execution, automation, and production quality monitoring.
• Lead test planning for sprints and releases, ensuring appropriate coverage across functional, regression, integration, and exploratory testing.
• Ensure QA investment is aligned to system risk, customer impact, and business priorities.
• Own the test automation strategy across unit, integration, end-to-end, and regression layers.
• Lead the design, implementation, and evolution of scalable automated test frameworks using C#, xUnit, Selenium, and Playwright.
• Drive consistency and reuse of automation frameworks, tooling, and approaches across teams.
• Ensure automated tests are stable, low-flakiness, and integrated into CI/CD pipelines for fast, trustworthy feedback.
• Own the release validation process, ensuring every release meets defined quality criteria before reaching production.
• Define and execute sprint release testing, combining automated regression with targeted exploratory and risk-based manual testing.
• Manage and coordinate system-level validation for cross-team changes, platform upgrades, and high-risk deployments.
• Define and lead approaches for testing non-deterministic AI systems, including prompt and output validation, dataset-driven evaluation, regression testing of AI behaviour, and guardrails and failure detection.
• Champion the responsible use of AI tools to support test generation, coverage analysis, and defect discovery, with appropriate review and validation.
• Define and implement quality controls for AI-generated code contributions, including detection of common AI-introduced anti-patterns, enhanced review checklists for AI-assisted PRs, and regression coverage expectations for agent-generated changes.
• Define, implement, and continuously improve quality gates that balance delivery speed with production safety.
• Partner with Platform teams to improve pipeline performance, scalability, and resilience.
• Proactively identify gaps in test coverage that could impact system reliability or customer experience, and drive improvements to close them.
• Act as the quality leader across delivery teams, embedding testability into design, refinement, and architectural discussions.
• Promote shared ownership of quality across Engineering, ensuring developers validate their own changes while QA provides strategic oversight and system-level assurance.
• Drive a culture of active AI tool experimentation and rapid workflow adaptation within the team.

Values and Behaviours

• Ensure testing protects real customer journeys and live environments.
• Take responsibility for quality outcomes, automation reliability, and production confidence.
• Work collaboratively across Engineering, Product, and Platform to deliver high quality outcomes.
• Focus on tests that reduce risk, improve reliability, and enable faster delivery.
• Continuously improve tooling, approaches, and the responsible use of AI in testing.

Success Measures

• High-confidence test coverage across critical systems with a balanced mix of automated and targeted manual testing.
• Clear, consistent, and trusted QA standards and processes adopted across teams.
• Measurable reduction in production defects and escaped issues.
• Effective release validation process with clear quality criteria and sign-off.
• Effective validation strategies for deterministic services and AI-enabled features, with measurable improvements in team testing throughput, quality, and lead time through the adoption of AI-native testing workflows.
• Faster, safer releases supported by reliable quality gates and actionable reporting.

Training and Enablement

• Structured onboarding with clear expectations for quality ownership.
• Dedicated time for learning automation frameworks, platform architecture, and AI testing practices.
• Budget for certifications and conferences.
• Collaboration with experienced engineers and technical leads.
• Regular 1:1s and career development support.
• Opportunities to contribute to testing strategy, tooling, and AI evaluation practices.

Skills and Experience

• Strong commercial experience in quality assurance and test leadership, with hands-on automation skills using C#, xUnit, Selenium, and Playwright.
• Proven experience leading QA strategy across multiple teams and products, spanning test planning, manual testing, and automation.
• Deep understanding of testing approaches across unit, integration, and end-to-end layers, including risk-based investment decisions.
• Experience with defect management, release validation, and test reporting in fast-paced delivery environments.
• Experience embedding automation into CI/CD pipelines with a focus on speed, stability, and feedback.
• Ability to set standards for test quality and QA processes, and to drive adoption through coaching, reviews, and practical enablement.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills with a focus on root cause analysis and prevention.
• Experience working in Agile Scrum teams and influencing engineering practices across multiple teams.
• Experience testing AI or LLM-enabled systems, including evaluation, monitoring, and regression approaches.
• Familiarity with cloud-native architectures, containerisation, and distributed systems.
• Exposure to contact centre, CCaaS, or high-availability SaaS platforms.
• Awareness of emerging multi-agent development patterns and tools and interest in evaluating their applicability to team workflows.
• ISTQB or equivalent QA certification.
• Strong interest in AI-assisted testing, automation of QA workflows, and continuous improvement.

Benefits and Perks

• 25 days annual leave plus your birthday off.
• Increased holiday entitlement with length of service.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity packages.
• Life insurance.
• Enhanced pension options.
• Company-paid sick leave.
• Personal training allowance.
• Buy and sell holiday options.
• Social, charity and culture committee events.
• Hybrid working (minimum two days in the office).

At MaxContact, we expect engineers to work effectively with AI tools every day. We welcome candidates who use AI to prepare their applications and encourage you to demonstrate your ability to collaborate with AI during any take-home assessments. During live interviews, we will assess your ability to think through problems and make engineering decisions, both with and without AI assistance. We are an equal opportunities employer; if you require any adjustments throughout our hiring process, please contact Hannah.holmes@maxcontact.com.