QA Automation Lead

Kaluza; West of England; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 125,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

26 days holiday

Private medical insurance

Pension scheme

Flex Fund of 5% of salary

Learning budget

Home office budget

Job summary

Kaluza is hiring a QA Automation Lead to join our London/Bristol based team. You will lead a team of QA engineers and work with developers to ensure high quality releases.

You will architect and scale test automation, create data and tooling, and drive AI-assisted testing strategies across Global Product Teams.

This permanent role requires strong leadership, deep automation expertise, and a passion for delivering robust software for energy platforms.

Qualifications

• Experience building and maintaining test automation frameworks.
• Strong programming fundamentals in Python or TypeScript.
• Ability to lead and coach engineers across test scenarios.
• Solid understanding of SDLC, Agile, and QA processes.
• Experience with AI-assisted testing and prompt engineering is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and enable engineers to implement automated tests at service and domain levels.
• Provide tooling for test data, automation and test result reporting.
• Partner with QA and engineers to implement automated handovers and end-to-end testing.
• Drive automation of testing, defect management and release processes across global teams.
• Collaborate with Enablement Team to build intelligent testing solutions and roll out.

Skills

Test automation framework design

Python

TypeScript

Playwright

Cypress

API testing

Leadership and mentoring

Education

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Git

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Role: QA Automation Lead

Location: London, Bristol

Level: C3

Team: Quality

Contract: Permanent

Reporting To: Senior QA Manager

Please note: This role requires an existing right to work in the UK. We can’t offer visa sponsorship, but we review sponsorship role by role, so keep an eye on our careers site for future opportunities.

About Kaluza

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, 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 you’ll do
The QA Automation Leads are part of a leadership team and they work closely with QA Leads and Staff Engineers to enable Development Engineers to test the code that they produce.

The QA Automation Leads will be an authority on test data creation, test tools, and test automation best practice. They will coach Engineers through test automation, provision tools, and automate controls to ensure the quality of code delivered to client-facing teams and clients.

They will work with the Quality Enablement Team to embed automation frameworks, as well as automation that will audit AI generated code and tests. They will be the conduit between Engineering teams using these tools and the Enablement Team.

The QA Automation Leads will support QA professionals in the Forward Deployed Engineering Teams in the creation and validation of End to End tests that involve their domains.

• Coach and enable development engineers to write automated tests at service and domain level, and to test their own products and solutions.

• Provide the tooling for creating test data, building test automation and reporting test results.

• Partner with QA and development engineers in Forward Deployed Engineering teams to define and implement automated handovers between teams, and support their end-to-end testing.

• Implement innovative automation of testing, defect management and release processes for Global Product Teams, using AI where it adds value.

• Work with the Enablement Team to build intelligent automated testing solutions (such as testing the tests) and roll them out.

• Use AI tools and techniques to build, refine and scale internal testing tools and frameworks, and build AI-driven tools that remove bottlenecks in code and architecture and speed up test-and-deploy cycles.

• Lead by example as a technical leader: champion best practice in test automation, AI code validation and agent tooling, write clean, testable code, perform code reviews and mentor mid-level and junior engineers.

What you’ll bring

• Experience building, maintaining and enhancing test automation frameworks, using tools and languages such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Playwright or Cypress.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals (design patterns, API design, data structures) in Python, TypeScript or similar, with experience automating tests using APIs.

• Knowledge of improving test data management, users and scenarios for ease of testing, and of working with developers to review automated unit and integration tests.

• Previous management experience, leading and coaching engineers across test cases

• A solid understanding of the SDLC, Agile methology and QA process.

• Experience using AI tools, such as LLM-based coding assistants and agent frameworks, as part of a pipeline, along with an understanding of prompt engineering and LLM evaluation techniques (faithfulness, relevance, LLM-as-a-judge), since traditional pass/fail assertions don’t translate well to AI agent testing.

• Excellent communication and influencing skills, able to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences and to collaborate with multiple stakeholders towards a common goal.

• Strong problem-solving skills and a solution-oriented mindset, with the willingness to speak up, highlight areas for improvement and suggest solutions.

Nice to have

• Experience building or integrating AI agents, such as LangChain, AutoGen, custom agent frameworks or MCP-based tooling.

• Experience working with or testing AI-generated code, models or agents, covering both deterministic validation (is the generated code correct?) and non-deterministic evaluation (is the AI’s behaviour acceptable?).

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and integrating automated testing into deployment workflows.

• Knowledgade of Jira and test management tools such as XRay.

Our Values

Five values guide how we work at Kaluza:

• Play to win: Collective pride in decarbonising energy at scale.

• Solve the real problem: Cutting through complexity to focus on real-world outcomes.

• Build trust every day: Consistency, transparency and doing what we say.

• Own the outcome: Full accountability, wins and setbacks, without ego.

• Go further together: Collaboration, respect and different perspectives.

Our Perks

• Time off and family: 26 days’ holiday, plus 26 weeks’ full pay for new parents with no qualifying service period

• Health and security: Private medical insurance with virtual GP, life assurance, pension scheme, free mortgage advice and eye tests

• Pay and flexibility: Discretionary bonus, a Flex Fund of 5% [of salary] to spend on the benefits you want most, retail discounts through Perks at Work

• Growth and setup: Personal learning budget, home office budget

• Climate: Furthr, our climate action app

Come as you are

We want to meet people from all walks of life. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be, and we recognise talent on merit and potential. If you’re excited about the role but don’t tick every box, we’d still love to hear from you.

Find out more on our careers page and LinkedIn. Our Applicant Data Protection Policy is here.