Test & Release Leader — Hybrid, Drive Quality & Automation

Barbour; South Shields; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary company bonus scheme

Staff Discount

Staff Shop

25 days holiday as standard increasing

Access to training and development

Free onsite parking

Subsidised canteen

Hybrid & flexible working

4pm finish on Friday

Job summary

Barbour is seeking a Test and Release Manager to join the IT team at our South Shields head office. You will own testing governance, release assurance, and automation to safeguard stability of core platforms.

The role combines office presence with one day of home-working weekly. Responsibilities include defining testing standards, managing SIT/UAT/regression, coordinating supplier-led releases, and driving end-to-end release governance across the enterprise landscape.

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of enterprise testing disciplines including SIT, UAT, regression, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Experience developing/testing governance frameworks and release management processes in complex enterprise environments.
• Experience managing SaaS releases, vendor-driven updates, and supplier-led releases.

Responsibilities

• Define, implement and maintain testing governance framework, standards, policies and procedures across SIT, UAT, regression, non-functional testing and release validation.
• Ensure quality gates compliance, risk-based testing, defect management and KPI/quality metric definitions.
• Develop and oversee test strategies, plans and execution for enterprise applications.
• Coordinate SIT and UAT across business and tech teams with appropriate environments and data.
• Review/approve deliverables from internal teams and suppliers; facilitate production release readiness reviews.
• Own end-to-end release governance across Barbour’s application landscape.
• Coordinate assessments/validation of supplier-led SaaS releases; manage rollback plans and release communications.
• Define and execute Barbour’s enterprise test automation strategy across platforms.

Skills

SIT testing

UAT testing

Regression testing

Release management

Test automation

Agile

Vendor management

Stakeholder management

Quality assurance

Test governance

Education

ISTQB

ITIL

Agile certification

Tools

Infor M3 ERP

Centric PLM

Salsify PIM

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Shopify

MuleSoft

SQL

Job description

Barbour is seeking a Test and Release Manager to join the IT team at our South Shields head office. You will own testing governance, release assurance, and automation to safeguard stability of core platforms.

The role combines office presence with one day of home-working weekly. Responsibilities include defining testing standards, managing SIT/UAT/regression, coordinating supplier-led releases, and driving end-to-end release governance across the enterprise landscape.