QA & Release Manager

Pets at Home; Greater London, Cheadle, Greater Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 65,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is on a mission to redefine the personal insurance experience for pets. As a QA & Release Manager, you will play a pivotal role in ensuring high-quality technology solutions across the pet insurance platform. This role involves developing comprehensive testing strategies, leading manual and automated testing efforts, and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver exceptional products. Your expertise in the pet insurance industry and agile methodologies will be crucial in driving continuous improvement and innovation. Join this exciting journey to enhance the pet insurance experience for customers and their beloved pets.

Qualifications

• Experience in pet insurance with strong customer insights.
• Proven ability to work in Agile methodologies.

Responsibilities

• Overseeing quality assurance processes for technology solutions.
• Developing testing strategies and coordinating test activities.

Skills

Pet Insurance Expertise

Collaboration & Communication

Customer Focus

Technical Understanding

Agile Delivery

Startup Mindset

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Business

Master’s Degree in Computer Science

Tools

Testing Frameworks

CI/CD Pipeline

Job description

QA & Release Manager

• Hybrid Working – with some requirement to travel to the Insurance Support Office (location tbc) and Pets at Home Support Office in Handforth, Cheshire, as required.
• Attendance at other national meetings, as required
• Up to £65k plus Comprehensive Benefit package

About Us

"We’re all for pets, what we do matters for pet owners across the UK. This is more than a business, it’s a responsibility. It’s a promise and commitment we make each day to provide excellent care for each pet that comes through our door.

Pets at Home’s vision, to create a better world for pets and the people that love them, is about to be realised further as we enhance our overall offering to pets and owners, through the introduction of our insurance product.

We are embarking on a mission to redefine the personal insurance experience through data-driven innovation and advanced technology, with a wrap-around customer experience that embodies our ethos and values.

About the Role

The QA & Release Manager will play a critical role in ensuring the successful and high-quality delivery of technology solutions across our pet insurance platform. This role is responsible for overseeing quality assurance processes and managing the end-to-end release lifecycle — from planning and coordination to execution and post-release validation.

Working closely with product, technology, and vendor teams, the QA & Release Manager will define testing strategies, coordinate test activities across environments and ensure releases meet both functional and non-functional quality standards. The role will act as a key gatekeeper for production readiness, with a focus on minimising risk, ensuring traceability and driving continuous improvement across QA and release practices.

As QA & Release Manager, this role will see you operating, leading, and influencing:

• Testing Strategy: Developing and implementing a comprehensive testing strategy, combining manual and automated testing approaches to ensure robust, high-performing and reliable solutions
• Manual and Automation Testing: Leading testing efforts throughout the software development lifecycle. Creating and maintaining test cases, scripts and testing frameworks, and ensuring testing is integrated seamlessly into the CI/CD pipeline
• Quality Assurance: Establishing and enforcing best practices for quality assurance and testing, ensuring that products meet both business and regulatory requirements
• Pet Insurance Knowledge: Leveraging your expertise in personal lines and pet insurance to lead customer research, feedback and analytics. This will help refine product features that enhance the pet insurance experience and meet the evolving needs of customers
• Insurance Domain Expertise: Applying your understanding of the personal lines and pet insurance industry to ensure that test scenarios are aligned with industry standards and meet customer expectations
• Agile Delivery: Leading product delivery within an Agile environment, prioritising the product backlog, refining user stories and ensuring timely, high-quality feature releases
• Continuous Improvement: Monitoring product performance and gathering customer feedback post-launch to identify areas for iteration and improvement, ensuring continuous enhancement of the product offering
• Collaboration: Working closely with product owners, developers and other stakeholders to understand business requirements and integrate testing processes into the development workflow
• Tooling and Technology: Selecting, implementing and optimising tools and technologies for automated testing, ensuring scalability, efficiency and alignment with the broader technology stack
• Support Discovery and Planning Phases: Driving early-stage discovery activities, supporting workshops, user journey mapping and test cases/plan development. Collaborating with architects and delivery leads to align platform capabilities with broader business goals, technical architecture and delivery timelines

About You – what we would like you to bring to our role

We are seeking an individual with a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Business, Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field. Ideally, a relevant certification in quality assurance, testing frameworks and/or Certified Scrum or similar credentials in product management or technology would also be welcome.

We’re looking for the following;

• Pet Insurance Expertise: Proven experience in the pet (personal lines) insurance industry, with a strong understanding of customer needs, market trends and regulatory requirements
• Collaboration & Communication: Excellent communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to meet business and technical objectives
• Customer Focus: Strong empathy for customers, with a track record of translating customer insights into actionable product features
• Technical Understanding: Comfortable working with engineering teams, translating business needs into clear technical requirements that support product development
• Agile Delivery: Experience working in Agile methodologies, with the ability to manage the product backlog, collaborate with teams and deliver features iteratively
• Startup Mindset: Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic startup environment, with a flexible approach to change and a strong initiative to drive projects forward

This is a pivotal role for us and a unique opportunity for you to join us at the beginning of our next stage of product and service evolution.

For a confidential initial conversation please contact [e-mail]

Pets just see people. They aren’t biased and they don’t discriminate. We take our inspiration from pets, and we value and respect difference in all its forms. Our aim is to reflect the diversity of the communities we operate in, and every colleague can help us achieve this. We encourage our people to be themselves so even if your skills and experience don’t perfectly align, if you think you can make a unique contribution through your values and behaviours, we want to hear from you!

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