Lead QA Engineer in England

We are PropertyBox, the UK's leading visual content partner for estate agents. We help estate agents transform the way properties are presented and sold by offering premium photography, floor plans, drone & aerial imagery, virtual tours, video trailers, and other visual content services. PropertyBox is an all-in-one, AI-powered property marketing platform, designed to make property marketing faster, more effective and more beautiful.

The Lead QA Engineer plays a key role in ensuring the quality, reliability and readiness of all software changes before release to customers. This is a predominantly hands-on role, with most of your time spent actively testing, investigating issues and improving quality practices, while also leading a small team of QA Engineers. You will help shape the QA approach across the engineering function, provide day-to-day guidance and coaching to the team, and ensure quality ownership is embedded throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

Reporting to the Engineering Manager, you'll be involved in:

• Leading by example as a senior, hands-on QA Engineer, carrying out functional, regression, integration and exploratory testing across software changes developed by the engineering team.
• Providing day-to-day leadership, mentoring and support for a team of QA Engineers, helping them prioritise work, develop their skills and continuously improve.
• Owning test planning and execution for key releases and initiatives, ensuring appropriate coverage and a pragmatic approach to risk.
• Working closely with software engineers, product managers and other stakeholders to clarify requirements, identify quality risks early and define effective test scenarios.
• Reviewing test cases, test evidence and defect reporting to ensure consistency, completeness and clear communication across the QA team.
• Coordinating testing activity across multiple work streams and release cycles to support timely, high-quality delivery.
• Managing defect triage, prioritisation, retesting and root cause feedback in partnership with the engineering team.
• Producing clear QA updates, test status reporting and release readiness input for stakeholders.
• Driving improvements in QA processes, standards and tooling to increase efficiency, coverage and confidence.
• Supporting the growth of test automation by identifying opportunities across front-end, back-end and API testing to complement manual testing and reduce repetitive effort.
• Ensuring issues are documented clearly, lessons learned are fed back into future delivery, and quality remains a shared responsibility across the team.
• Promoting a culture of ownership, continuous improvement and high engineering standards across QA and the wider technology function.

Who we're looking for:

• Strong background in software quality assurance and testing within a modern software delivery environment.
• Proven hands-on experience across functional, regression, integration and exploratory testing.
• Experience leading, mentoring or coaching QA Engineers, with the confidence to provide direction and support to a small team.
• Hands-on knowledge of test planning, test case design, defect management and release support.
• Good understanding of web, mobile app and API testing approaches, with the ability to assess risk across different product areas.
• Experience collaborating closely with software engineers, product managers and business stakeholders to improve quality throughout delivery.
• Ability to introduce pragmatic QA processes that balance speed, risk and quality in a fast-moving environment.
• Familiarity with test management and defect tracking tools, and an interest in improving QA tooling, reporting and ways of working.
• Understanding of test automation principles and where automation can add value alongside manual testing.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a proactive, ownership-driven approach.
• Able to communicate quality risks, test results and priorities clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Passion for product quality, continuous improvement and helping others raise the bar.

Qualities:

• Detail-oriented and quality-focused in all aspects of work.
• Hands-on, pragmatic and comfortable leading from the front.
• Supportive leader who enjoys coaching others and building strong working relationships across teams.
• Calm, organised and able to manage competing priorities effectively.

We are a remote-first business and across the Technology and Product teams we operate a flexible working policy with up to 1 day a week in our East Croydon shared office space though this is flexible.

At PropertyBox we believe in our journey and our way of working reflects an 'all together' approach to solving problems, working together and shared vision. Alongside this we also offer all our colleagues:

• Flexible remote-first home-working.
• 25 days annual leave, plus bank holidays, plus your birthday.
• Flexibility to buy and sell additional days.
• Up to 6% company contributed pension.
• Private healthcare.
• Life assurance.

Please note due to the volume of applications received, it may not be possible to respond to every application.

Right to Work Requirement: Applicants must have an existing, permanent right to work in the UK. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.