Lead QA Engineer

Rocket Lab; London; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading TransitTech company is seeking a Lead QA Engineer to drive quality practices within a fast-paced engineering team. This role will involve leading QA strategy, enhancing automation capabilities, and ensuring robust testing across web and mobile applications, fostering collaboration and best practices in quality assurance.

Qualifications

• Experience in high-growth product-led tech companies.
• Hands-on experience with automation for web and mobile apps.
• Understanding of risk-based testing and quality metrics.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and rollout of QA best practices.
• Build and maintain automated test frameworks.
• Conduct high-value manual and exploratory testing.

Skills

Test Automation

Manual Testing

Collaboration

QA Strategy

Communication

Education

Significant experience in QA roles

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Appium

Pytest

PHPUnit

Job description

Lead QA Engineer

We’re looking for a Lead QA Engineer to lead the charge in elevating our quality practices across a modern, fast-moving engineering team. This is a high-impact role — perfect for someone who’s both technically hands-on and passionate about building quality into the development lifecycle from the start.

You’ll work across our core stack (PHP, Python, and TypeScript) and help ensure test coverage across both web and mobile applications. You’ll drive QA strategy, improve our automation capabilities, and help guide our shift-left testing approach. This isn’t just about finding bugs. It’s about building confidence in our product, driving quality upstream, and making sure we ship robust, scalable solutions at pace. You’ll work closely with developers, product managers, and stakeholders to ensure quality is baked in from the start, while championing best practices and modern QA approaches.

We’re a fast-moving TransitTech business with plenty of exciting challenges—legacy code, evolving architecture, and new features that need rigorous testing across web, iOS, and Android platforms. If you thrive in an environment where you can make a real impact, we’d love to chat.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the design and rollout of QA best practices across engineering.
• Build and maintain robust automated test frameworks across API, UI, and mobile — with tools suited to our stack (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, Appium, Pytest, PHPUnit).
• Support data-driven decision-making — using test coverage metrics, bug trends, and release health to influence quality improvements.
• Conduct high-value manual and exploratory testing, particularly where automation is not yet in place.
• Owning system, integration, and E2E testing across multiple interconnected applications
• Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and designers early in the development cycle to define quality expectations and acceptance criteria.
• Champion a shift-left testing culture by integrating testing into design and development phases.
• Act as a mentor to the wider team in QA best practices

What We're Looking For

• Significant experience in QA roles, ideally in high-growth or product-led tech companies.
• Strong hands-on experience with test automation for web and mobile apps — ideally using:
  • Playwright, Cypress, Selenium (UI)
  • Appium (mobile)
  • Pytest, PHPUnit, or similar (API/unit testing)
• Familiarity with our tech stack: PHP, Python, TypeScript and SQL.
• Passion for manual testing where it adds value — especially in exploratory testing and early-stage improvements.
• Strong understanding of QA strategy, risk-based testing, and quality metrics.
• Experience in Agile environments, with a proactive approach to embedding quality early in the development cycle.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills — able to partner across engineering and product teams.
• Knowledge of non-functional testing (performance, security, etc.)

Nice to Have

• Experience testing across microservices, cloud-native systems, or distributed architectures.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and tools such as GitHub and Bitbucket
• Experience with tools like Testomat, Postman, TestRail, or Allure for test management and reporting.
• Previous mentoring or coaching of QA team members.

Why Zeelo

Zeelo is on a mission to make shared transportation more accessible, efficient, and sustainable. We’re scaling fast, and this is a chance to help shape the future of our technology in a role where you’ll have real ownership and impact.

• Zeelo is a TransitTech company powering bus operators, employers and schools to provide highly efficient, sustainable and affordable transport programs
• Our mission is to empower opportunity through sustainable transportation
• Our vision is to build the category leader for employers and schools offering transportation as a benefit
• Our culture strives to be a high performing sports team.Inspired by the Boston Celtics “Ubuntu” mindset - I am, because we are.
• Our model is asset light, we do not own vehicles or employee drivers, instead we routinely procure bus operator partners to provide ground transportation
• We’re a team of 130+ across offices (London, Barcelona & Boston) and live in 2 markets (UK, & U.S.)

• Our values are Trust, Efficiency and Drive. Learn more about Zeelo’s culture here.