Test Lead - Automation & Quality Engineering

Looking for a hands-on QA Test Lead opportunity with a competitive salary in a modern product engineering environment?

Join a growing payments technology company in a senior technical leadership role across manual testing, automation and quality engineering.

We’re currently looking for a QA Test Lead to drive testing practices across multiple engineering squads while remaining hands-on across automation, API testing, release readiness and quality delivery.

This is a high-impact opportunity suited to someone who enjoys leading from the front, mentoring QA engineers and improving testing capability across complex product environments.

This role is best suited to someone with previous experience in payments, transactional systems, SaaS or global software product environments.

The Role
Lead and mentor a small QA team across manual and automation testing
Drive quality engineering practices across multiple delivery squads
Remain hands-on across testing, automation and release validation
Build, maintain and improve automated test frameworks and tooling
Support API, integration and end-to-end testing initiatives
Work closely with engineering and product teams to improve delivery quality
Contribute to CI/CD and automated testing workflows
Support defect investigation, troubleshooting and root cause analysis
Help define testing standards, quality gates and release readiness processes
Improve automation coverage, testing efficiency and platform reliability
Collaborate with developers on shared ownership of quality practices
Support testing across software, transactional and hardware-integrated environments

About You
Previous experience as a QA Lead, Test Lead or Senior QA Engineer leading testing practices
Strong commercial experience across manual and automation testing
Hands-on automation testing experience, ideally with Playwright, Cypress, Selenium or similar
Previous experience working in a payments, transactional systems, SaaS or global software product environment
Strong understanding of API testing, integration testing and backend validation
Experience working with CI/CD pipelines and Agile engineering teams
Able to write SQL queries for validation and troubleshooting
Comfortable mentoring QA engineers and improving testing standards
Strong communication skills and a pragmatic, delivery-focused approach
Able to work closely with developers, product teams and wider technical stakeholders

Highly Regarded
Experience testing payment platforms, transaction processing, card payments, EFTPOS, settlement, reconciliation, gateways or switching environments
Experience working with hardware-integrated, device-based or high-volume transactional systems
Experience with modern automation tools such as Playwright or Cypress
Experience building automation frameworks from scratch
Experience testing distributed, cloud or containerised systems
Exposure to performance, security or reliability testing practices

Key Details
Permanent full-time opportunity
Hybrid working environment
Competitive salary package on offer
Hands-on technical leadership role
Lead a team of 3 QA engineers
Modern product and engineering environment
Growing payments technology company
Strong long-term growth opportunity

If you’re an experienced QA Lead, Test Lead or Senior QA Engineer looking for a hands-on leadership role where you can influence quality engineering practices while remaining close to the technology, this could be a great opportunity to step in and make an impact.

For a confidential discussion, please hit APPLY or contact Georgia Engel at Northbridge Recruitment on ************ .