Quality Lead

Zinc Work Ltd; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

24 days holiday

Annual benefits allowance

Early finish Fridays

Yearly company retreat abroad

Work from anywhere 30 days

Pension with NEST

Zinc shares EMI Scheme

Therapy access

Company socials

Nursery workplace benefit

Electric car scheme

Anniversary rewards

Job summary

Zinc in London is seeking a Quality Lead to shape how Quality Engineering looks and to define the quality function at Zinc. You will join early in a new team, shaping practices from the ground up.

In the initial months you\u2019ll map where quality breaks and implement regression coverage. You will coach engineers to test their own work, and as the function matures you\u2019ll hire a small team to scale the approach across the product.

Qualifications

• Experience embedding quality practice inside engineering teams, where engineers own testing.
• Designed testing strategy and regression plans from a blank page for a product in customers\u2019 hands.
• Comfortable with third-party tools for mocking and complex test scenarios.
• Experience in a compliance-driven environment and maintaining compliance in a platform over time.
• Ability to define and report quality metrics for leadership readouts.
• Experience building and mentoring small QA/quality teams.

Responsibilities

• Find where quality breaks down across the product and engineering process; identify real risk.
• Design and maintain regression test plans to enable fast shipping.
• Coach engineers to test within pull requests to raise testing standards.
• Develop tools and approaches for hard scenarios beyond standard testing patterns.
• Build reliable test environments with mocks for hard-to-reach platform parts.
• Raise the bar across the SDLC by embedding quality practices.
• Report quality metrics to leadership and use them to drive improvements.
• Help hire and grow a small quality team (two to four people).
• Teciuca

Skills

Quality Assurance

Test Strategy

Test Tooling

Compliance Experience

Metrics & Reporting

Mentoring / Coaching

Tools

Cypress

Playwright

Jest

Vitest

CircleCI / CI-CD

Job description

Zinc is looking for a Quality Lead to improve the quality of our product and the way we test it. This is the first hire into a new team, and it's an exciting place to come in: you'll define what Quality Engineering looks like at Zinc.

Zinc runs a Quality Assistance model. Engineers own the quality of what they ship, and that ownership sits at the same level as anyone whose job title has the word quality in it. You'll be the person who makes that model work, and who builds the foundation underneath it.

The early months are about getting close to the codebase and the team. You'll work out where quality breaks down today, and build the regression coverage that catches those failures before a customer ever sees them. A large part of the job is coaching engineers to test their own work well. As the function settles, you'll start hiring a small team around you.

Key Responsibilities

• Finding where quality breaks down – Assess problem areas across the product and the engineering process, and work out where the real risk is concentrated.
• Building the safety net – Design and maintain regression test plans that give the team the confidence to ship at pace.
• Coaching engineers to test – Train and support engineers so that good testing happens inside the pull request, which is what makes Quality Assistance actually work.
• Solving the hard cases – Devise tools and approaches for the complicated scenarios that standard testing patterns can’t reach.
• Building reliable test environments – Work with third‑party tools to create mock systems and dependable test scenarios for the parts of the platform that are hardest to get at.
• Raising the bar across the SDLC – Introduce and embed quality best practices at every stage of the software development life cycle.
• Reporting on quality – Track and report the metrics that show how healthy the product really is, then use them to find the next process improvement.
• Building the team – Grow a team of two to four people, starting with the hiring.
• Teciuca

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Quality Assistance – Experience embedding quality practice inside engineering teams, where the engineers do the testing and your job is to raise their ceiling.
• Test Strategy & Regression Planning – You’ve designed testing strategy and regression plans from a blank page, for a product already in customers’ hands.
• Test Tooling & Mocking – Comfortable with third‑party tools for building mocks and dependable scenarios across complex or awkward systems.
• Compliance Experience – You’ve worked inside a compliance‑driven organisation, and you understand how compliance gets maintained within a platform over time rather than signed off once.
• Metrics & Reporting – You can define and report the quality metrics that give leadership a genuine read on product health.
• Teciuca

Tech Stack

• JavaScript / TypeScript — day‑to‑day language for writing and maintaining automated tests. Comfort here is a requirement, not a nice‑to‑have.
• Cypress - front‑end end‑to‑end testing — already in use at Zinc, so the person inherits this rather than choosing it.
• Playwright — or an equivalent JS‑based E2E framework. Named alongside Cypress as the kind of tooling we want more depth in.
• Jest — back‑end testing.
• Vitest — front‑end component testing.
• CircleCI / CI-CD — comfortable in pipelining work

Soft skills

• A Natural Teacher – You get real satisfaction from raising the skill level of the engineers around you, and you’re patient with the people who need it most.
• Highly Collaborative – You work inside engineering every day, alongside product and design, and you treat quality as something the whole team carries.
• Process‑Minded – You spot the opportunities to improve how we work across the SDLC, and you know how to land a change once you’ve found it.
• Kind & Supportive – You build a positive, respectful culture around you, lifting others up and working with humility.

What we offer

• 24 days holiday + Bank Holidays + your birthday off
• £1200 annual benefits allowance ( ThanksBen , from month 2)
• Early finish Fridays (16:00)
• Yearly company retreat abroad
• 30 days to Work from anywhere
• Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, and Adoption Leave (13 weeks full pay, 17 weeks half pay, then SMP for maternity, 1 month full pay for paternity/adoption)
• Statutory pension with NEST (3% employer, 5% employee)
• Zinc shares, issued through the EMI Scheme
• Unlimited access to Spill Therapy
• Company socials, quarterly team socials Free Monday lunches
• Nursery workplace benefit scheme (Yellownest)
• Option to lease an electric car through Electric Car Scheme
• Celebrated Zinc anniversaries