QA Lead in London

QA Lead

As QA Lead you will be responsible for shaping and driving the quality assurance strategy across the developing technology ecosystem, balancing the need for rapid progress and sustainable quality as the business and systems evolve. Working closely with Architecture & Engineering, Product and Business teams, you will establish best practices, build confidence in our quality and release processes and foster a “right first time” culture where quality is a shared responsibility. This is a hands‑on leadership role in a rapidly growing organisation. You’ll define QA standards, establish testing practices through third‑party arrangements and embed automation from day one; you will also be a contributor to business interactions, partner leadership and strategy & report development. The environment is a combination buy, build and AI / agentic tools distributed across the workforce.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the QA Strategy, processes and standards across the software development lifecycle.
• Develop and maintain a scalable testing framework that supports manual testing but which emphasises automated testing.
• Lead test planning, execution, defect management and release readiness activities across multiple product teams.
• Work closely with Product Managers, Engineers, Business Analysts, and stakeholders to define acceptance criteria and ensure quality is embedded from the earliest stages of development.
• Drive test automation actively across all products and projects.
• Establish quality metrics, reporting and dashboards to product transparency regarding quality and progress.
• Continuously improve QA processes, tools and methodologies to support rapid and reliable software delivery.
• Deploy methods and tools suited to an agentic development environment across applications and data lakehouse.
• Ensure testing activities support security, performance, resilience and compliance relevant to a regulated business.
• Ensure testing of data lakehouse supports classification, rights access & rights to use, traceability, integrity, security and availability.
• Contribute to the continuous evolution of our engineering culture by promoting collaboration, ownership and continuous improvement.

About You

You are an experienced QA professional who combines strong technical expertise with a pragmatic, collaborative approach to driving up quality whilst ensuring progressive delivery. Comfortable operating in a small, dynamic, multi‑region, multi‑partner matrix organisation. You are self‑starting, open, striving for better, adaptable and motivated by continuous improvement.

Skills and Experience

• Proven experience leading Quality Assurance within an agile software development environment.
• Strong understanding of QA methodologies, testing strategies and SDLCs.
• Designing and implementing automated testing frameworks and tools.
• Hands‑on experience with API integration, functional, regression, end‑to‑end testing, and adept at supporting through User Acceptance.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated testing into deployment workflows.
• Experience testing modern data platforms built on a Lakehouse architecture, ensuring the quality, integrity and reliability of data across ingestion, transformation, storage and consumption layers.
• Familiarity with cloud‑based platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake.
• Familiarity with observability tools and techniques to proactively identify data quality issues and pipeline failures.
• Experience using test management and defect tracking tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps and similar.
• String understanding of risk‑based testing and quality governance.
• Ability to analyse complex systems and identify areas of potential quality risk.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, with the ability to explain business issues to technical teams and technical issues to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Previous experience working within insurance, reinsurance industries is highly desirable as is experience of high‑growth scale‑up environments.

We provide equal opportunity to all qualified individuals regardless of race, colour, religion, age, gender, gender expression, national origin, veteran status, disability, orientation, or any other legally protected categories. If you have a need that requires accommodation, please email us at We’re hiring people from all walks of life who are curious, collaborative and ambitious.

We look forward to hearing from you! If you’re curious, collaborative, and ambitious, you’ll find the opportunity at WillisRe to shape something extraordinary.