Lead Engineer (Quality) – DTC Platform Engineering

Description

The company is a global sports brand that makes footwear, apparel and accessories. It operates in over 120 countries and has about 22,000 employees.

You would join the DTC Platform Engineering group, which builds shared platforms and engineering services that product teams use to build, test, ship and run software safely and reliably at scale. Those product teams are its main customers.

The group covers cloud, developer experience, software delivery, quality, security, performance and AI-enabled engineering, with the aim of faster delivery and consistent standards.

This role sets quality strategy across the direct-to-consumer technology estate, including web, mobile, commerce, integrations and platform services. You will set the standards, test architecture, frameworks and practices, working with engineering, product and platform teams. The focus is on reusable tooling, quality insight, governance and modern testing, so teams release with more confidence and stability.

Responsibilities

• Set the regression testing, test automation and quality engineering strategy for several products and teams.
• Lead one or more automation teams, mentoring people and building their skills.
• Make the architecture, framework, tooling and standards decisions for quality work.
• Build and maintain scalable automation for web, mobile, API, integration and end-to-end testing.
• Move quality checks earlier and connect automated tests to CI/CD pipelines and release steps.
• Keep regression coverage complete and tune test suites for stability, maintainability and speed.
• Define quality metrics, automation KPIs, release readiness criteria and quality dashboards.
• Work with product, engineering, DevOps, SRE and architecture teams to build quality into every stage of development.
• Bring in modern practices such as API-first testing, service virtualisation, test data management and AI-assisted testing.
• Drive continuous improvement to raise automation coverage, reduce defect leakage and strengthen release confidence.

Requirements

• 10+ years in quality engineering, test automation and software testing, including leading automation teams.
• Skill in designing and building scalable automation frameworks and test architectures.
• Proven record of leading enterprise-wide regression testing and quality engineering programmes.
• Hands-on use of Playwright, Maestro or Appium.
• Solid programming in JavaScript/TypeScript, Python or a similar language.
• Hands-on API and integration test automation for REST and GraphQL services.
• Experience running automated tests in CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions or an equivalent.
• Strong grasp of Agile delivery, test strategy, quality governance and release management.
• Experience with performance testing, observability, production validation and non-functional testing.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field.
• Strong leadership, stakeholder management, problem-solving and communication skills, with the ability to influence quality across multiple teams.
• Optional, highly desirable: experience with AI-assisted testing, intelligent regression testing or LLM-powered quality engineering.
• Optional, a plus: cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-OS test automation with BrowserStack, LambdaTest or equivalent platforms.
• Optional, strongly preferred: experience in eCommerce, retail or consumer digital products.
• Optional, a plus: validating experimentation platforms, feature flags and A/B testing programmes.

Conditions

Equal opportunity applies to all candidates, and every hiring decision is made by people rather than automated systems or AI tools.