About the role

Test Strategy Lead

Role Purpose

The Test Strategy Lead is the single accountable owner for quality across the Programme, ensuring quality is engineered from inception through an automation first, AI enabled testing strategy.

The role provides independent assurance that releases are stable, compliant, scalable and safe for partner onboarding, reducing delivery risk, accelerating time to value and building confidence with stakeholders, regulators and partners.

Key Accountabilities

Own and define the Programme wide Test and Quality Strategy aligned to business outcomes, architecture, risk appetite and regulatory obligations.
Act as the single point of accountability for quality across all delivery streams and partners.
Embed a shift left quality model across discovery, design and build phases.
Provide release readiness assurance and quality reporting to senior governance and executive stakeholders.

Core Responsibilities

Test Strategy & Governance

Design and maintain a holistic testing strategy covering functional, non-functional, integration, data, security, performance, resilience and regulatory testing.
Define quality standards, governance, entry/exit criteria, defect management and risk based testing approaches.
Ensure alignment with architecture, DevOps, security, data and regulatory compliance teams.

Automation First Testing

Define and lead the automation strategy, driving scalable, reusable test assets across the lifecycle.
Embed high levels of automation across APIs, integrations, UI and data within CI/CD pipelines to enable fast, reliable releases.

AI Enabled Quality & Assurance

Introduce and govern AI driven testing and analytics, including AI assisted test design, predictive risk analysis, execution optimisation and quality insights.
Ensure responsible, transparent and compliant use of AI within test processes.

Integration & Partner Assurance

Lead end to end testing for complex integrations and partner onboarding.
Establish certification, evidence based assurance and sign off for external partners.
Ensure test environments, data and tooling support multi partner testing at scale.

Stakeholder Engagement & Leadership

Act as a trusted advisor on quality, risk and release confidence.
Influence adoption of quality first, automation driven ways of working.
Mentor and upskill teams in modern quality engineering practices.

Skills & Experience

Essential

Enterprise scale test strategy leadership in complex, regulated environments.
Strong quality engineering, shift left and DevOps knowledge.
Expertise in test automation, CI/CD integration and modern tooling.
Executive level assurance and release readiness reporting experience.

AI & Innovation

Experience or strong knowledge of AI enabled testing tools and techniques.
Data driven mindset with ability to translate AI into measurable outcomes.

Leadership & Communication

Proven senior stakeholder engagement and influencing skills.
Clear communicator of risk, quality and trade-offs in business terms.
Comfortable leading through complexity and ambiguity.

Success Measures

Reduced late stage defects and release instability.
High automation coverage with measurable efficiency and reliability gains.
Consistent, evidence based release and partner onboarding assurance.
Increased stakeholder confidence in quality and Programme sustainability.