Director, Quality & Release Engineering

Kaluza; West of England; Hybrid; GBP 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension Scheme

Discretionary Bonus Scheme

Private Medical Insurance

Life Assurance

Home Office Budget

26 days holiday

Progressive Leave Policy

Personal Learning Budget

Job summary

Kaluza seeks a Director of Quality & Release Engineering to lead the quality strategy and governance across multiple delivery streams. You will manage an engineering team building AI-assisted automation and test data capabilities, while aligning QA leadership across domains to maintain high standards of release readiness.

You will drive a bold QA transformation, overseeing shift-left approaches, risk-based testing, and AI tooling adoption.

Qualifications

• Proven track record leading a QA or quality engineering function of significant scale.
• Experience in delivering a QA transformation including AI adoption and automation maturity uplift.
• Experience managing quality outcomes across multi-client or multi-product platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own quality strategy and release governance across delivery streams.
• Directly manage engineers building bespoke automation tooling leveraging AI and LLMs.
• Lead QA leads embedded across domains and define the operating model for the function.
• Drive change management and upskill the function in AI tooling and context engineering.
• Own end-to-end release quality processes including environment strategy and post-release monitoring.

Skills

QA leadership

Tooling & automation

AI/ML in QA

Multi-timezone leadership

Stakeholder comms

Tools

AI tooling

CI/CD tooling

Observability tools

Job description

• Job title: Director, Quality & Release Engineering
• Location: London or Bristol (Hybrid Office - 3+ days per week)
• Salary: £150,000 - £180,000
• Team: Quality & Release
• Level: Director

This role is based in London or Bristol and requires existing right to work in the UK.
At this time, we are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role. We are committed to building a diverse, global team and our sponsorship policy is evaluated on a role-by-role basis. We encourage you to keep an eye on our careers site to stay informed about future opportunities where we are able to offer visa sponsorship.
Kaluza is the Energy Intelligence Platform, turning energy complexity into seamless coordination. We help energy companies overcome today’s challenges while accelerating the shift to a clean, electrified future.
Our platform orchestrates millions of real-time decisions across homes, devices, markets and grids. By combining predictive algorithms with human-centred design, Kaluza makes clean energy dependable, affordable and adaptive to everyday life.
With teams across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, and a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, we power leading companies including OVO, AGL and ENGIE, as well as innovators like Volvo and Volkswagen.
What will I be doing?

The quality engineering function is shifting from manual oversight and process governance toward an AI-assisted product development lifecycle where QA leads its own domain test strategy and bespoke tooling drives automation maturity. This role will drive this shift in our organization and ways of working.

You will own quality and release governance at programme level, directly manage an engineering team building AI-assisted automation and test data capability, and set the standard that QA leads across delivery streams work to. You will be as comfortable driving change as you are accountable for outcomes. Responsibilities will include:

Strategic Quality Leadership

• Own and evolve the quality strategy across delivery streams, aligned to programme objectives and client SLAs
• Define and maintain release governance frameworks — release readiness criteria, risk acceptance, and sign-off authorities
• Set quality standards and coverage expectations; ensure QA leads translate these into domain-level test strategies
• Drive defect governance at programme level — internal and client-facing SLA compliance
• Represent quality and risk in senior leadership, architecture, and product forums

AI-Driven Tooling & Automation

• Directly manage a team of engineers building and maintaining bespoke automation tooling, leveraging AI and LLM capabilities
• Own the test data management strategy — including AI-assisted synthetic data generation and environment data integrity
• Evaluate and select off-the-shelf AI testing tools; define governance frameworks for their use and validation
• Ensure governance gates are maintained as AI participation in the PDLC grows — accountable humans must remain in the loop for risk acceptance and production judgement
• Establish tooling standards that QA leads can adopt across domains without creating dependency on a central bottleneck

QA Function Leadership & Operating Model

• Lead, develop, and performance-manage QA leads embedded across domains; define the operating model and career framework for the function
• Own the accountability split clearly: QA leads own test strategy and tooling choices for their domain; this role owns the standard they work to
• Drive consistency across streams without becoming a handoff point — enable QA leads to move fast within well-defined guardrails
• Build a quality engineering culture — not a bug-finding one

Change Management & Adoption

• Lead the transformation of QA practice from script maintenance to intelligent, risk-based, AI-assisted quality engineering
• Drive upskilling across the function — building capability in AI tooling, context engineering, and agent-assisted workflows
• Manage resistance and build confidence in new ways of working; bring the team through change without losing them
• Communicate quality outcomes in business terms to senior stakeholders — escaped defect rates, release stability, risk posture

Release Management

• Own the release quality process end-to-end: environment strategy, regression coverage, go/no-go decisions, and post-release monitoring
• Embed shift-left practices — quality gates early in the PDLC, not just at release
• Manage the tension between delivery velocity and release stability, particularly as AI-generated code volumes increase

About You
Ideally you’ll have/be

• Proven track record leading a QA or quality engineering function of significant scale — including embedded domain leads and direct management of practitioners
• Has directly managed engineers building tooling or automation infrastructure — not just managed QA practitioners executing test plans
• Has delivered a meaningful QA transformation: AI adoption, automation maturity uplift, defect governance overhaul, or similar
• Has worked in a multi-client or multi-product platform environment, managing quality outcomes across concurrent delivery streams
• Has owned release governance in a complex, multi-stream delivery context — including go/no-go accountability
• Exposure to energy, utilities, billing, or similarly regulated complex domains is a plus — not essential
  Strong grounding in test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration — sufficient to credibly lead engineers building these things
• Working knowledge of LLMs and AI tooling in a QA context: test generation, defect triage, coverage analysis, synthetic test data
• Understands test data management principles and the challenges of environment data integrity at scale
• Able to evaluate build vs. buy for tooling; assess AI testing platforms with appropriate scepticism
  Comfortable setting strategy and being accountable for outcomes — not just owning process
• Able to operate at programme level with senior engineering and product stakeholders
• Experienced in leading distributed, multi-timezone quality functions
• Strong communicator — translates quality metrics into business outcomes; can make the case for investment in tooling and governance
  Demonstrated experience leading practice transformation in an engineering context
• Able to bring people with them through transitions that challenge established ways of working
• Comfortable with ambiguity; can hold direction steady while the detail is still being worked out
• Familiar with observability, production monitoring, and shift-right quality practices

Where you'll work
We offer flexible working, with an expectation of 3 days a week in the office. This gives us the best of both: real time together to collaborate and build relationships, with the flexibility to work in the way that suits you best the rest of the week.

Kaluza Values
Here at Kaluza we have five core values that guide us as a business: Play to win, Solve the real problem, Build trust every day, Own the outcome, Go further together.

Our Perks

• Pension Scheme
• Discretionary Bonus Scheme
• Private Medical Insurance + Virtual GP
• Life Assurance
• Access to Furthr - a Climate Action app
• Free Mortgage Advice and Eye Tests
• Perks at Work - access to thousands of retail discounts
• 5% Flex Fund - to spend on the benefits you want most
• 26 days holiday
• Progressive Leave Policy - With no qualifying service periods, including 26 weeks full pay if you have a new addition to your family
• Personal Learning Budget - Upskill, learn and grow!
• Home Office Budget
  And more!

We want the best people
We’re keen to meet people from all walks of life — our view is that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We want to build teams which represent a variety of experiences, perspectives and skills, and we recognise talent on the basis of merit and potential.
We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they tick every box. But if you're excited about joining us and think you have some of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure, we'd still love to hear from you.
Find out more about working in Kaluza on our careers page and LinkedIn.