Quality Assurance Manager

In the words of one of our senior clients recently, "Market Research has changed more in the last 3 years than the previous 40". System1 is the leading global Marketing decision-making platform. We help brands measure and understand whether their marketing works. Predictive technology is our passion but our focus is very much human. We understand the power of emotion and capture the nuances of human behaviour to power data-driven decisions. We want to drive change and rewire behaviours, envisioning a world where our pioneering methodologies are embedded in the workflows of every marketing decision-maker. We are also who we are because of our people. So if you share our enthusiasm, are ambitious, creative, and highly motivated, then we’d love to hear from you!

Join the System1 team to continue to help us remove the guesswork for marketeers everywhere, as well as secure our growth, ambition, and success.

Becoming part of our team means owning quality, enabling speed, and leading people. We’re looking for a talented and experienced QA Manager to take full ownership of Quality Assurance across our products and platform. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role for someone who can set direction, grow people, and embed quality into a modern, continuously delivering engineering organisation.

Reporting to the Head of IT Development, you will lead a QA team of 11 people and growing and play a key role in shaping how quality is defined, measured, and delivered across the business. This role is not about being a final gate or a “super tester”. It’s about owning quality outcomes, enabling teams to move fast with confidence, and making risk visible and manageable.

What you will be doing:

• You will lead a QA organisation focused on automation-first testing within a microservices, .NET-based CI/CD ecosystem.
• Working closely with Engineering, DevOps, and Product, your goal will be to enable frequent — ideally daily — releases through scalable automated testing, reliable pipelines, and robust quality engineering practices.
• You will drive the transition away from manual testing toward automated unit, integration, contract, performance, and end-to-end testing, ensuring quality checks are embedded directly into CI/CD workflows.
• This includes improving test reliability, reducing flakiness, and ensuring fast feedback cycles across distributed services.
• You’ll define tooling, frameworks, and standards for test automation, support teams in adopting them, and ensure our testing approach evolves alongside the architecture.
• Quality should be measurable, visible, and continuously improving.

What success looks like:

• Success in this role means releases are frequent, predictable, and low-risk, supported by automation that is trusted, maintainable, and genuinely useful.
• Defects are found early rather than leaking into production, and the QA team feels empowered, supported, and continuously developing.
• Most importantly, quality conversations move away from test counts and pass rates, and instead focus on outcomes, impact, and risk - giving the business real confidence in what we ship.

Technical background:

• You don’t need to write code every day, but you do need to deeply understand the technical landscape your team works in and be able to challenge, guide, and support them effectively.
• You’ll bring strong experience with test automation in a .NET environment, including designing and maintaining frameworks using C#, Selenium, and Reqnroll, and integrating these into CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with unit and test frameworks such as NUnit, xUnit, or MSTest is expected. Experience or interest in K6 is a plus.
• You’ll be comfortable working in containerised environments, using Docker to create and manage test environments, with a solid understanding of Docker Compose and CI/CD practices, including feature flags.
• Data validation is an important part of our testing strategy, so strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases such as SQL Server or MySQL are essential.
• You’ll also have experience working within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, including Azure DevOps, Azure SQL, and Azure Functions, and understand how testing fits into cloud-based deployment strategies and scalable environments.
• From a testing discipline perspective, you’ll be experienced in defining and maintaining test strategies, test plans, and documentation, managing defects and traceability, and producing meaningful quality metrics and reports that support decision-making rather than vanity reporting.
• Experience with API testing (REST, Postman, Swagger/OpenAPI), microservices architectures, cross-browser testing using tools like BrowserStack, and modern delivery practices such as BDD/TDD will all be valuable.

Leadership and people management:

• This is first and foremost a people leadership role. You’ll have at least five years’ experience in QA leadership, with a proven track record of managing and developing distributed and remote teams.
• You’ll be responsible for performance management, hiring, mentoring, and building a strong, motivated QA team.
• You’ll also play a key role in evolving QA processes and ways of working within Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban), and in influencing how quality is approached across delivery teams.
• Strong communication skills are essential. You’ll be comfortable working across locations and time zones, collaborating with developers, Product Owners, and senior leaders, and translating technical risk into clear, business-focused language.

Why join us:

Quality is taken seriously here - at both engineering and leadership level. This role comes with real ownership and influence, not just responsibility without authority. You’ll be joining a modern engineering environment built around CI/CD, Docker, and cloud technologies, with the opportunity to shape how quality works across the organisation and to leave a lasting impact on how we deliver software. If you’re a QA leader who wants to move beyond checklists and gates, and instead own quality as an outcome, this is a role where you can genuinely make that happen.