Chapter Lead QA

The Admiral Group is a multinational financial services provider, where technology is key to our success. We have an opportunity for a Chapter Lead to refine and champion our QA best Practice and support the Chapter Members within our Customer Engagement tribe.

The role is one of leadership; and both technical and people leadership skills are required. You will line manage a team of QA engineers ensuring that they have the skills required to be successful in their role, and that they find their role rewarding, empowering and satisfying.

About The Team

You will be part of the Contact Centre Hub (CCH) component team, supporting individuals across several different delivery teams. Additionally, you will be part of the QA capability, which sits across all areas of technology at Admiral.

CCH works in many different areas, and we have QA engineers who focus on backend testing (APIs and data pipelines) frontend testing (Web UI, Conversational UI), and across products that we have built from the ground up and products where we have configured a SaaS service. The teams follow Agile principles and best practices to deliver high quality software, and we’re always open to suggestions on how we can get even better.

About You

We are looking for a passionate and experienced QA leader to inspire and guide a team of talented QA engineers spread across several software delivery teams. We’d love to find someone who enjoys empowering others to achieve outcomes, rather than someone who micro manages against numbers.

You must have a strong understanding of QA processes and methodologies, and the ability to manage, mentor and motivate your team, fostering a strong culture of quality and continuous improvement.

Accountabilities & Responsibilities

• Responsible for recruitment, development and retention of technical resources including career pathway development for all technical squad members. 
• Responsible for providing and applying effective performance management processes and mechanisms supporting other management structures of the delivery team.  
• Responsible for providing an inclusive environment where Chapter members have freedom and safety to innovate, experiment, and learn from failure.
• Responsible owner and role model for applying the following values: productivity, quality, transparency, and openness into the Chapters ways of working and production of outcomes. 
• Responsible for enabling delivery teams to meet their outcomes by supporting them in problem identification, root cause analysis, and decision-making.
• Responsible for serving as a senior coach and advisor to delivery teams. Remaining close enough to the teams to add value and to be a competent manager, while staying far enough away to let them problem-solve on their own.
• Accountable for ensuring engineering, design and testing standards and practices comply with Admiral IT governance and architectural standards while performing in a heavily regulated environment.
• Accountable for the continuous improvement of automated testing frameworks.
• Accountable for the professional growth of your team.

Essential Skills and Experience

• A vision for what a high performing QA function looks like, as well as for the individuals within that function.
• Proven ability to progress a team towards this vision.
• A strong understanding of agile processes and good familiarity with scrum and kanban frameworks.
• Experience of working collaboratively with other members of a leadership team to reach a shared objective.
• Experience working in a professional development framework, completing and recording regular check ins, semi regular one to ones, annual appraisals etc.
• Experience managing individuals in a scaled agile organisation; where different teams may approach delivery in different ways but must coordinate to deliver pieces of work that may rely on multiple teams.
• Methods and techniques for structured reviews, including reviews of technical work products, test plans, business cases, architectures and other key deliverables.
• Testing techniques used to plan and execute software tests of all application components (functional and non-functional) to verify that the software satisfies specific requirements and to detect errors.
• Functional / Non-functional principles using a main framework (preferably Playwright with Typescript or JMeter) for the effective shift-left on testing in the development lifecycle.
• ISTQB Foundation in Software Testing (or equivalent).

Desirable Skills and Experience

• Knowledge of telephony systems, contact centres or other domain specific knowledge.
• You won't be expected to write automated tests however your team will, so having an understanding of automated testing practices, tools and languages would be beneficial.

Admiral: Where You Can

We take pride in being a diverse and inclusive business. It's a place where you can Be You, and show up as you are. We’re committed to fostering a people-first culture where everyone is accepted, supported, and empowered to be brilliant. You can, Grow And Progress at a pace and direction that suits you, Make A Difference for our customers and each other, and Share in Our Future with all colleagues eligible for up to £3,600 of free shares each year after one year of service.

Everyone receives 33 days holiday (including bank holidays) when they join us, increasing the longer you stay with us, up to a maximum of 38 days (including bank holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to an additional five days of annual leave.

We’re proud of our people-first culture. In fact, we've been recognised as a Great Place to Work for Women, a Great Place to Work for Wellbeing, and an overall Great Place to Work for over 25 years! We’re fully committed to making sure your progression is not slowed or halted by barriers related to race, gender, age, sexuality or any of the protected characteristics.

Our fantastic benefits make sure our colleagues have a great work-life balance; You can view some of our other key benefits here.

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