Test Analyst

firstrand; Johannesburg; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Firstrand seeks a strategic QA leader to drive the overall testing strategy, spanning manual and automated efforts. You will provide technical leadership across the testing lifecycle, enhance automation maturity, and strengthen governance to ensure high-quality, low-risk deliveries.

You will define roadmaps, improve test design, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure requirements are testable and releases are ready.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Honour's Degree preferred in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the overall testing strategy across manual and automation testing.
• Provide strong technical leadership across the testing lifecycle and governance.
• Lead automation roadmaps, framework stability, and CI/CD integration.
• Improve manual testing practices, risk-based testing and traceability.
• Establish quality metrics, dashboards and release readiness reporting.
• Collaborate with BAs, Developers, DevOps, Product Owners and stakeholders.

Skills

Testing strategy

Automation testing

CI/CD

Quality governance

Leadership

Test automation frameworks

Regressions and regression testing

Test design and planning

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Honour's degree (preferred)

Job description

Job Description

The purpose of the role is as follows:

To lead and drive the overall testing strategy across manual and automation testing, ensuring that technology solutions are delivered with high quality, reduced risk and strong alignment to business objectives. The role provides technical leadership across the testing lifecycle, strengthens test governance and quality controls, improves automation maturity, enhances manual testing practices and builds a high-performing testing capability that supports reliable, efficient and scalable delivery.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the overall testing strategy across manual and automation testing, ensuring alignment to business priorities, delivery timelines, risk appetite, quality standards and release objectives.
• Provide strong technical leadership across the testing lifecycle by understanding system architecture, integrations, data flows, environments, APIs, databases and downstream impacts to support effective test planning and decision-making.
• Lead the continuous improvement of automation testing by defining the automation roadmap, prioritising high-value automation candidates, improving framework stability, increasing regression coverage and embedding automation and regression into CI/CD and release processes.
• Strengthen manual testing practices by improving test design, exploratory testing, risk-based testing, regression planning, evidence quality and traceability between requirements, test cases, defects and business outcomes.
• Establish clear test governance, standards, quality gates and entry and exit criteria to ensure consistent delivery quality across projects, enhancements, production fixes and releases.
• Plan, coordinate and oversee test execution across functional, integration, regression, automation, user acceptance, performance and production validation testing, ensuring effective prioritisation and timely delivery.
• Apply risk-based testing principles to identify critical business processes, high-impact systems, complex integrations and areas of technical change that require focused test coverage and early risk mitigation.
• Lead defect management processes by ensuring defects are clearly documented, prioritised, assigned, tracked to closure and analysed for recurring root causes and quality improvement opportunities.
• Establish quality metrics, dashboards and trend analysis to report on test progress, automation coverage, defect leakage, test effectiveness, release readiness and improvement opportunities for stakeholders and leadership.
• Partner with Business Analysts, Developers, DevOps teams, Product Owners, Project Managers and business stakeholders to ensure requirements are testable, environments are ready, dependencies are managed and quality risks are transparent.
• Drive shift-left quality practices by promoting early tester involvement in requirements, solution design, technical walkthroughs, test data planning and environment readiness discussions.
• Manage testing resources, capacity, workload allocation and priorities across manual and automation teams to ensure effective delivery while balancing planned work, urgent fixes and production support demands.
• Coach, mentor and develop testers by improving technical capability, automation skills, analytical thinking, test design discipline, stakeholder engagement and ownership of quality outcomes.
• Champion collaboration and accountability within the testing team by creating clear ways of work, encouraging knowledge sharing, promoting continuous feedback and building a culture of quality ownership.
• Evaluate and improve test tools, frameworks, processes and operating models to increase efficiency, reduce manual effort, improve predictability and support scalable delivery across multiple initiatives.
• Ensure production defects, incidents and post-release issues are reviewed to identify testing gaps, strengthen regression packs and implement preventative controls for future releases.
• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences by translating test progress, quality risks, technical dependencies and release readiness into clear, actionable insights.
• Promote compliance with organisational governance, security, audit, change management and release management requirements throughout the testing lifecycle.
• Act as a strategic quality leader who proactively identifies opportunities to improve delivery confidence, strengthen test maturity, reduce operational risk and build a high-performing manual and automation testing capability.

Qualifications

• Minimum: Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• Preferred: Honour's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

Experience and Skills

• 7 to 10+ years' experience in software testing, quality engineering or test management, including hands-on technical testing experience and proven leadership of manual and automation testing teams within complex technology environments.
• Strong technical understanding