Head of Quality Engineering

Lendable; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work

Private health cover

Retirement savings

Office meals

Employee referral bonus

Job summary

Lendable is hiring a Head of Quality to drive engineering quality across the organisation. You will balance hands-on testing, strategic QA leadership, and coaching of teams to improve quality gates and SLOs. The role includes in-code testing contributions and building AI-enabled QA tooling.

You will work with PMs, EMs and engineers to scale QA practices as the company grows, with a focus on measurable quality improvements and reducing incident rates.

Qualifications

• At least 7 years in quality related roles.
• Proven ability to run QA initiatives across multiple engineering teams.
• Strong senior stakeholder management experience.
• Hands-on testing across backend and frontend (functional, unit, performance, accessibility).
• Experience line-managing a small team.

Responsibilities

• Own the engineering quality across the organisation.
• Lead SLOs, quality gates and AI-assisted testing initiatives.
• Manage and deploy QA engineers into product teams to improve quality.
• Embed quality thinking throughout the SDLC and shift-left testing practices.
• Develop and apply AI tools (LLMs) to improve testing efficiency and accuracy.

Skills

QA leadership

Stakeholder mgmt

Testing across stack

CI/CD pipelines

AI tooling in QA

Tools

Datadog

Sentry

GitHub Actions

incident.io

Job description

About Lendable

Lendable is on a mission to build the worlds best technology to help people get credit and save money.We're building one of the worlds leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

• One of the UK’s newest unicorns with a team of just over 700 people
• Among the fastest-growing tech companies in the UK
• Profitable since 2017
• Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs
• Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9 across 10,000s of reviews on Trustpilot)

So far, we've rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers' hands in minutes instead of days.

We're growing fast, and there's a lot more to do: we're going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions worth of financial products are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes.

Join us if you want to

1. Take ownership: you are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1
2. Work in small teams of exceptional people: Lendies are relentlessly resourceful. We challenge the status quo to solve problems and find smarter solutions
3. Build the best technology in-house: we use new data sources, machine learning and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting

About the role

Quality at Lendable is a team-level responsibility with participation from PMs, EMs and engineers to ensure the right guardrails are in place to deliver quality software. We aggressively automate across the whole test pyramid and only manually test where absolutely necessary.

We're hiring a Head of Quality to be accountable for engineering quality across the organisation, while local responsibility for delivering quality stays with each team. As we grow in headcount and customer numbers, this role keeps the bar high by taking signals from our existing quality processes, evolving our quality gates, and enabling teams rather than gatekeeping them. It is a hands-on role with a managerial aspect.

The role will take the lead on using AI in the quality process. Innovating with LLMs to improve efficiency and accuracy of testing.

What good looks like: in your first 12 months:

• Reduction in incident rate per PR.
• SLO coverage across services meaningfully increases.
• Introduction of effective AI-assisted quality tooling in the SDLC.
• Effective risk based quality reporting on quality.

What you'll be doing

Own the engineering quality of the organisation

Service Level Objectives

• Monitor and report on SLO performance.
• Engage teams to mature their SLO definitions.
• Introduce systematic performance testing in the SDLC.
• Ensure initiatives to improve SLO performance are completed.

Incidents

• Own the follow-ups and resolutions from the incident process across engineering.
• Ensure follow ups from incidents are completed.

From these and other sources Identify hotspots, catalogue and evaluate risks and recommend remediations.

How you’ll do this

Being Hands-on

This is not a pure managerial role. You will be engaging with teams, innovating with testing solutions and contributing code to test frameworks and CI pipelines.

Managing a team

• Hiring and managing a team of ~2 Quality Engineers, they will be new hires to the company.
• Deploying Quality Engineers into engineering teams to help them improve their quality.
• Managing and supporting individuals that are embedded into different teams across the organisation

Driving a Quality Mindset

• Evangelising quality across the organisation.
• Work with MDs and other senior stakeholders to identify and create solutions to their quality challenges.
• Embedding quality thinking into all phases of the SDLC, not just the testing part.
• Looking for opportunities to shift-left the testing practices.
• Forming a guild of Quality representatives across the organisation

Running Initiatives

• Scoping and inserting quality initiatives onto teams roadmaps.
• Championing these initiatives with senior stakeholders

Developing the use of AI into the quality process

Bring tools and processes into the organisation to level-up our testing efficiency using AI. AI testing agents, AI test failure triage agents and AI observers for production environments.

Tech stacks you will be working with

Backend Coding: PHP, Kotlin, GO, Python Frontend Coding: Typescript, React, React Native, GraphQL, Relay Testing: PHPUnit, Behat, JUnit, Kotest, Jest, Maestro, K6 Observability: Datadog, Sentry, Incident.io, Grafana Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ Deployment: Argo, Github, Github Actions

What we're looking for

Essential

• At least 7 years in quality related roles.
• Run a number of QA initiatives across an organisation to improve the quality output across engineering teams.
• Proven senior stakeholder management.
• Experience working with quality across the stack. You have hands-on experience of testing backends and frontends. From functional to unit, performance and accessibility testing.
• Have line managed a small team.
• Worked with B2C products at scale (millions of users).
• Experience shaping CI/CD pipelines for test reliability (GitHub Actions or similar), including flakiness reduction, parallelisation, artefact management, and runtime control.
• Have shipped AI tooling into a quality process — this can be as simple as evaluating, buying and rolling out an off-the-shelf AI testing tool, through to building bespoke agents. You can describe the impact it had on how teams worked.
• Proactive, low-ego, and clear communicator, able to chase things down when blocked.

Nice to Have

• Experience with using Datadog, Sentry or similar for monitoring.
• Experience with incident.io or similar incident process.
• Have managed SLOs and used them to improve quality.
• Experience in financial services or other regulated B2C environments.
• Mobile app testing experience (e.g. Maestro, native iOS/Android, React Native).

Why join?

• See your work matter: Our products are used by millions of customers. Improving quality ensures issues and outages don’t affect a large population across continents. Quality issues also have a direct impact on company revenue. As we scale further, quality plays a big part in our growth.
• High autonomy: You will decide where and how to engage across the organisation to improve quality. You will hire a team of Quality Engineers to deploy into teams.
• Work at the frontier of AI: AI tooling for quality is moving fast. You'll be one of the people deciding how we apply it - what's useful, what isn't, and where to have humans in the loop.
• An organisation that ships: No layers, no theatre, fast decisions. A fast moving environment that has made the company successful.

Interview process

1. Screening Call with the Talent Team
2. Hiring Manager Call
3. VP of Engineering Call
4. Technical Interview
5. Final stage with our CTO

Life at Lendable

• Winning team: the opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies
• Flexible working: flexible approach tailored to each role. Hybrid roles require three days in-office weekly; fully remote roles include regular opportunities for in-person connection through socials and off-sites
• Socials & connection: opportunities and events to come together, socialise, and get to know each other beyond the office walls
• Health coverage: support for your physical and mental wellbeing, including private health cover
• Retirement & savings: long-term financial wellbeing through retirement savings plans
• Employee referral programme: earn a competitive bonus when you refer successful new team members
• Office meals & snacks: enjoy a fully stocked kitchen, plus complimentary lunches prepared by in-house chefs on in-office days at select locations
• Sustainable commuting: cycle-to-work and electric vehicle salary sacrifice schemes available in select locations

Please note: The availability and details of specific benefits vary by location and role. For more information, please speak to your Talent Partner.

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