Quality Lead (Agentic Development) in Manchester

As the Quality Lead within the Castle project team, you'll be at the heart of a unique and exciting venture to build a new financial services platform using an agentic manufacturing line approach.

You'll be responsible for defining the quality requirements that feed into our cells, setting the quality standards and best practice the cells work to, and ensuring that delivered work, whether agent‑led or human‑led, meets those requirements.

Operating like an independent start‑up within an established organisation, you'll be completely at home with iterative engineering and modern agentic delivery.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the overall quality and test strategy, ensuring that quality is engineered in rather than verified later.
• Define the quality requirements that feed into each agentic cell and set the quality standards and best practice the cells work to.
• Supervise AI agents producing test coverage, regression, and defect detection, continuously improving that capability and intervening hands‑on where needed.
• Identify and drive opportunities for agent‑led testing, continuous testing, and quality improvements.
• Implement tools, frameworks, or prompts that uplift quality capability across cells.
• Own technical acceptance criteria across the platform.
• Collaborate closely with Technical Leads, Product Owners, and cell members to ensure quality practices support reliable, secure, and scalable delivery.
• Ensure consistency of quality standards and practices across cells through code‑review feedback, tooling usage, and compliance with quality frameworks.
• Track and reduce testing‑related technical debt, including flaky tests, outdated frameworks, and missing automation backlog items.
• Maintain test data availability and environment readiness to keep delivery cycles moving.

Qualifications

• Experienced quality leader with a working knowledge of agentic development and quality leadership in an agent‑led environment.
• Driven by boundless curiosity and experimentally minded, with a passion for starting with ‘why?’, being tenacious, persistent, and able to ruthlessly prioritise to stay on track.
• Strong collaboration skills and a champion of radical candour.
• Test strategy, planning, and management experience.
• Automated functional testing experience (Jest, Cypress, Playwright).
• Performance testing tools experience (JMeter).
• Test data management skills.
• Knowledge and experience of target platforms (microservices, APIs).
• Proficient in Java Script and Type Script, Java Script runtime and package management (Node, NPM).
• Source‑control experience using Git, Git Lab.
• Monitoring tools experience (Grafana, Kibana).
• Experience with agentic‑driven delivery, including agent‑led test authoring and prompt/context engineering for test design and defect triage.
• Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and application lifecycle management (Jira, Confluence).
• ISTQB Advanced Level Test Manager certification (desirable).

Benefits

• 24 days holiday plus 8 bank holidays.
• Annual bonus scheme.
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave.
• Company pension with up to 8% N Brown contribution.
• Mental health support both internally and externally, including access to wellbeing champions and counselling services.
• Financial wellbeing support including the Stream tool.
• Colleague discount across all N Brown brands.
• Onsite café with subsidised rates and local restaurant discounts.
• Life Assurance and Private Medical Insurance.
• Paid volunteer time – a full day per year paid to volunteer for a charity of your choice.
• Working Arrangements
• Hybrid working, varies across the business depending on the role.
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• Head Office located in Manchester’s Northern Quarter; commuting by train, tram or bus is mandatory.
• Mandatory working hours: 36.17 per week over 5 days.
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