QA Engineering Manager in London

Who We Are: We have built the new way for energy to be transacted. tem exists to fix a creaking energy market. Today's wholesale system is stacked in favour of the few - a relic of the oil and gas era, riddled with markups and middlemen. We're changing that. Our product, REDTM, is built on a proprietary pricing engine that bypasses the wholesale market, enabling businesses to buy energy produced by renewable generators directly. That means clear, auditable transactions that ensure affordable bills and fair compensation - giving every business real ownership and control over where their energy comes from. Since launching in 2021, we've saved UK businesses and generators over £25 million, powering a growing network of forward‐thinking companies, from Pizza Pilgrims to Silverstone. Backed by top‐tier VCs including Atomico and Albion, we're creating a new category in energy - one that's decentralised, direct, and built on trust.

The Role: We're looking for a QA Engineering Manager to build and lead a high-performing, centralised Quality Assurance function that enables confident, high-velocity delivery across the business. This is primarily a people leadership role. You'll create the conditions for strong QA performance through coaching, clarity, and stakeholder alignment. You'll lead a team of both automation and manual QA engineers who support multiple business units as internal clients. Managing priorities, balancing demand, and ensuring predictable, high-quality delivery will be central to your success. While you won't be expected to contribute hands‐on day to day, you bring prior experience in QA engineering and a strong technical foundation that allows you to guide standards, support technical decisions, and maintain credibility with engineers.

In your first 12 months, success looks like this: you've built trust across Engineering and Product, established clear QA processes and prioritisation mechanisms, strengthened automation coverage and test reliability, improved release confidence, and developed your team into a scalable, high‐impact function without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy.

Responsibilities:

• Build and grow a high‐performing QA team: lead hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career progression for a centralised QA team. Foster a culture of ownership, quality, continuous improvement, and professional growth across both automation and manual testers.
• Own QA delivery and prioritisation: manage intake and prioritisation across multiple business units, balancing competing demands while maintaining clarity and predictability. Ensure QA work is aligned to business priorities and delivered with high standards and strong communication.
• Strengthen quality practices and automation strategy: partner with Engineering teams to improve automation coverage, regression reliability, and overall release confidence. Support the maintenance and evolution of QA environments, tooling, and best practices without being hands‐on day to day.
• Act as a strong cross‐functional partner: build trusted relationships with Engineering, Product, Design, and Operations. Serve as the bridge between QA and the wider business, ensuring expectations are clear, trade‐offs are understood, and stakeholders are kept informed.
• Provide technical credibility and guidance: leverage your background in QA and engineering to guide standards, review approaches, and support your team in solving complex testing challenges — particularly across backend systems and distributed architectures.
• Champion a remote‐native culture: lead with empathy and intention in a fully remote environment. Create alignment, clarity, and accountability in an async‐first culture while maintaining strong team connection and morale.

Requirements:

• Proven QA leadership experience: experience leading QA teams in a fast‐paced, high‐growth environment. Strong people management skills, with a track record of coaching, performance management, and developing individuals at different stages of their careers.
• Strong stakeholder and communication skills: exceptional ability to manage internal clients across multiple business units. Comfortable navigating competing priorities, setting expectations, and influencing without authority.
• Delivery and prioritisation mindset: experienced in managing centralised QA functions supporting multiple teams. Able to bring structure and clarity to demand management without over‐process.
• Technical credibility in QA and engineering: background in QA engineering, including both manual and automation testing. Prior hands‐on experience is expected, though the role is not hands‐on.
• Familiarity with modern backend‐focused stacks: experience working with teams building systems using technologies such as Python, Node.js, React, and AWS serverless architectures. Comfortable testing distributed and backend‐heavy systems.
• Remote‐first leader: proven experience leading distributed teams and fostering accountability, alignment, and engagement in a fully remote environment.
• Mission‐driven and quality‐focused: you care deeply about delivering reliable, high‐quality systems that enable business impact. You help your team stay focused on outcomes, not just activity.

Benefits & Perks:

• Competitive salary: our current band for this role is £101,000 or equivalent in local currency. We review salaries twice a year using real‐time market data, with transparent, consistent pay for the same role and level.
• Stock Options - everyone on the team has ownership in our mission.
• 25 days holiday + public holidays - Swap public holidays for ones that matter most to you. Plus, get an extra day off for your birthday.
• Remote & flexible working - We're fully remote with clear core hours, and no internal meetings on Friday afternoons.
• Home working & wellbeing budgets: Up to £1,200 / €1,200 annually to upgrade your remote setup (co‐working passes, equipment, etc.). Up to £150 / €150 monthly on anything that supports your wellbeing - from therapy to gym memberships to meditation apps.

Interview Process: Our processes normally take around 2-3 weeks from first call to offer - please let us know about any adjustments to timelines that may be required. First call with our Talent Team (30 min). This is to understand your experience, motivations, and discuss the role in more detail. Behaviour Interview with our CTO (45 min). This is your chance to really understand the role, the expectations, and ensure alignment on ways of working. Skills Interview with the Team (75 min). You'll meet with potential peers in this session and will discuss how you lead and manage high performing teams, and discuss a range of scenarios. Culture-Add Interview with Stakeholders (45 min). The final session will be with two cross‐functional stakeholders, and will explore how your values align with ours, and is designed to be a genuine two‐way conversation, your chance to understand what it's really like to work at tem.

We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, experiences, and identities, including those that are traditionally underrepresented in the tech and energy sectors. If you're excited about this role but not sure you meet every requirement, we'd still love to hear from you. Your unique perspective could be exactly what we're looking for.