About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Test Lead to drive quality assurance and testing across a strategic digital platform implementation within a financial services environment.
In this role, you will be responsible for defining and delivering the end-to-end testing strategy, ensuring that platforms, integrations, data flows and downstream reporting meet business, technical, security, regulatory and operational requirements.
Working closely with Product, Business, Architecture, Engineering, Data, Risk, Compliance, Information Security, Operations and external technology partners, you will establish a structured, risk-based testing approach that supports successful delivery and provides confidence in solution quality and go-live readiness.
This is an opportunity for a hands-on testing leader who combines strong technical expertise with stakeholder leadership, sound risk judgement and a commitment to delivering secure, reliable and customer-focused digital solutions.
Key Responsibilities
Stakeholder and Delivery Leadership
- Act as the central quality lead across Product, Business, Architecture, Engineering, Data, Risk, Compliance, Information Security, Operations, and external vendor teams.
- Manage dependencies across internal teams and external partners to maintain delivery momentum, testing quality, and release readiness.
- Translate technical testing findings into clear business impacts, risk assessments, and actionable recommendations.
- Facilitate test planning sessions, readiness reviews, delivery status updates, and risk discussions across project teams.
- Coach analysts and delivery contributors in risk-based testing, defect prevention, evidence quality, and effective stakeholder communication.
Test Planning and Strategy
- Develop and maintain the overall test strategy, master test plan, estimates, integrated test schedule, and resource requirements.
- Establish risk-based test coverage, requirements traceability, quality metrics, quality gates, and entry and exit criteria.
- Adapt testing strategies and approaches as business requirements, solution architecture, and delivery priorities evolve.
- Identify and communicate quality risks, dependencies, and delivery blockers early, providing clear recommendations to support informed business decisions.
- Ensure testing activities align with organisational quality standards, risk management frameworks, and applicable regulatory obligations.
End-to-End Testing and Integration Assurance
- Lead the planning and execution of functional, integration, system, regression, end-to-end, user acceptance, and production-readiness testing.
- Validate event-driven integrations across in-scope customer and operational touchpoints, including API and file-based exchanges, error handling, retries, duplicate prevention, sequencing, and reconciliation.
- Verify the accurate and timely flow of data and customer feedback into downstream dashboards, reporting platforms, and business workflows.
- Maintain end-to-end traceability from business and technical requirements through test scenarios, execution results, defect management, and acceptance evidence.
- Validate cross-system processing to ensure transactions, customer interactions, and associated data are processed accurately and consistently.
Data Quality, Security and Privacy
- Define and execute data validation testing across customer master data, operational interaction data, and platform outputs.
- Validate data completeness, accuracy, timeliness, mapping, lineage, refresh cycles, and reconciliation across source and target systems.
- Ensure appropriate role-based access, data masking, and privacy controls are implemented when handling personal, confidential, or restricted information in non-production environments.
- Collaborate with Risk, Compliance, Information Security, and Technology teams to validate controls and safeguard sensitive customer and business information.
- Maintain appropriate testing evidence to support auditability, risk oversight, control assurance, and release approvals .
Test Automation and Non-Functional Assurance
- Establish a pragmatic test automation strategy for repeatable API, integration, data, and critical user journey regression testing.
- Develop and maintain reusable test assets, integrating automated checks into delivery pipelines where feasible.
- Coordinate non-functional testing across performance, security, resilience, recovery, accessibility, browser and device compatibility, single sign-on (SSO), and access controls.
- Partner with Architecture, Information Security, platform, and vendor teams to ensure non-functional requirements and technology controls are adequately tested and evidenced before go-live.
Defect and Environment Management
- Lead defect triage, prioritisation, resolution tracking, and cross-system issue management, ensuring clear ownership and timely escalation.
- Coordinate test environments, access, test accounts, stubs, mocks, and representative, privacy-safe test data.
- Track testing progress, defect trends, dependencies, and outstanding issues, escalating risks that may affect delivery timelines or release quality.
- Work collaboratively with delivery teams and vendors to resolve issues and maintain effective testing execution.
Experience and Skills
- Proven experience leading testing and quality assurance for complex digital, SaaS, or multi-system implementations, ideally within financial services or another regulated environment
- Experience with customer experience, feedback, or analytics platforms is highly regarded.
- Strong SQL and data validation skills, including source-to-target mapping, data transformations, completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and reconciliation
- Strong capability in developing and delivering test strategies, plans, estimates, schedules, and quality governance across the end-to-end delivery lifecycle.
- Extensive hands-on experience across functional, integration, API, data, end-to-end, regression, and user acceptance testing.
- Demonstrated experience testing event-driven integrations, REST APIs, batch and file-based interfaces, error handling, and cross-system data reconciliation..
- Working knowledge of test automation frameworks and approaches for APIs, web applications, and data pipelines, with the ability to guide implementation and assess automated test results and code.
- Understanding of identity and access management, including single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), role-based access controls, and SaaS user provisioning.
- Sound understanding of data privacy, information security, operational risk, and control requirements within financial services environments.
- Proven ability to coordinate external vendors, distributed delivery teams, test environments, test data, defect resolution, and release readiness.
- Experience using Jira, Confluence, and test management and reporting tools such as Zephyr or equivalent platforms.
- Strong stakeholder engagement, communication, and planning skills, with the ability to translate complex technical findings into clear business risks, impacts, and actionable recommendations.
- Experience delivering technology transformation or platform implementations across banking, insurance, wealth management, payments, or other financial services sectors is desirable.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, establish clarity across multiple delivery teams, and maintain a consistent view of quality, risk, and release readiness.
- Proven ability to coach and support team members, promote constructive challenge, and drive timely decision-making.
- A proactive and collaborative approach to problem-solving, with a focus on developing simple, reusable, and sustainable testing practices.
- Strong sense of accountability and ownership, balancing delivery outcomes and efficiency with appropriate quality, risk, and control standards.
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