Job Title: Lead Quality Engineer
Salary: £92,701 - £109,060
Location: Newport/Cardiff
Hours: Full time
Working Pattern: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week currently, or 40% of our time, at our Newport office. (the location may transition to Cardiff towards end of 2026)
About us…
Like the modern Britain we serve, we’re evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We’re growing with purpose.
About this opportunity
The role sits within the Transport Platform, which is a key member of the wider Consumer Lending Business Unit. Our mission is to keep Britain moving by providing customer focused solutions to facilitate access to vehicles, maintenance, and related services including Digital account management. We are committed to supporting the Group and wider UK in driving forward the sustainability agenda.
In pursuit of our mission, we are on a journey to transform our core technology architecture and the technical capabilities of our colleagues. We’re investing heavily in simplifying and modernising our technology architecture by developing new digital journeys, enabled by microservices, and leveraging a new data ecosystem. All using modern frameworks and native Cloud capabilities. Whilst embedding DevOps and Agile working practices to enable feature teams to increase autonomy and effectiveness.
As a Lead Quality Engineer, you’ll work in a team of engineers to design, develop and integrate software features to achieve their goals. Working within a Lab Feature Team alongside an Engineering Lead, Product Owner and Quality Engineers to achieve business and technology outcomes whilst retaining a deep focus on service.
What you’ll do
You should feel excited by the prospect of making lasting positive impact through:
Design and implement orchestrated testing pipelines for microservices architectures across complex multi‑cloud environments, embedding functional and non‑functional testing throughout the full development lifecycle to ensure resilience and performance. Additionally, enable other Quality Engineers to define and implement automation‑first test approaches that ensure software is stable, scalable, performant, accessible, and secure by utilising endorsed technologies and applying common build patterns.
Developing load injection and stubbing capabilities to simulate service behaviours under varied conditions. You’ll enable robust validation and early detection of performance bottlenecks.
Validating data lake and data warehouse solutions, ensuring data integrity, transformation accuracy, and performance across large-scale datasets. You’ll help teams trust their data and analytics.
Engineering CI/CD testing workflows using tools like GitHub, linting tools, Kubernetes, and GCP. You’ll integrate quality guardrails into every stage of delivery.
Applying strong analytical skills to dissect complex systems and identify discrepancies between expected and actual behaviours. You’ll drive root cause analysis and continuous improvement.
Lead strategic planning and roadmap development for Testing and Quality, looking 6–12 months ahead to evolve capabilities in line with platform needs. This includes scheduling work, anticipating future demand, and proactively adopting emerging Group tooling as it matures to unlock practice-wide benefits in pace, quality, and safety through standardised automation capabilities
Fostering a culture of enablement, where testing capabilities are federated—not centralised—empowering teams to own, develop, test, and deliver their own features.
Embedding observability and quality enforcement using platforms like Dynatrace, SonarQube, Harness, and Jenkins. You’ll ensure visibility and compliance across delivery pipelines.
What you’ll need
To be considered for and successful in this role, you will need to be able to demonstrate experience in:
Designing and implementing automated testing pipelines for microservices architectures across multi-cloud environments, covering both functional and non-functional testing using tooling like JMeter or Gatling.
Hands-on experience with load injection and stubbing development to simulate and validate service behaviours under varied conditions using tooling like WireMock, MockServer or Locust.
Strong background in data lake and data warehouse testing, including validation of data integrity, transformation logic, and performance across large-scale datasets using tooling like dbt, or Informatica.
Proficiency in CI/CD tooling and cloud-native platforms e.g. GitHub, Jenkins, Harness, Kubernetes, GCP, Terraform.
Strong analytical skills for dissecting complex software systems and identifying discrepancies between expected and actual behaviour. Familiarity with ELK Stack, Grafana, Prometheus is beneficial.
Experience in fostering a federated testing culture, enabling feature teams to own, develop, test, and deliver their own features. Exposure to Shift-Left testing practices and TestOps frameworks is advantageous.
Strong collaboration and mentoring skills, with active contributions to Communities of Practice and a commitment to continuous improvement.
Experience with GCP databases such as BigQuery and Spanner, and traditional relational databases including PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle. Familiarity with Liquibase for schema management is a plus.
Familiarity with quality enforcement and CI/CD orchestration tools such as SonarQube, Harness, Jenkins, Nexus Repository, AquaSec.
About working for us
Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms.
We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture.
We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative.
And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups.
We’re disability confident. So, if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.
We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:
A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance
Share schemes including free shares
Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top
A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies
Want to do amazing work, that’s interesting and makes a difference to millions of people?
Join our journey!
