QA Lead

**Job Classification**
- QA Lead - 141749
- Closing date - 8th September 2025
- Job Family
- Informaton Technology
- Career Stream
- IT Operations
- Leadership Pipeline
- Manager of Others

**Job Purpose**
- To Lead Quality Engineering in squads in accordance with the agreed Test Engineering & Quality practices. Ensure alignment across stakeholders to optimise the testing efficiencies across the Product delivery stack. Ensure team effectiveness and healthy team dynamics.

**Responsibilities**:

- Liaise with Stakeholders across Group Technology to build a network that will align to nWoW
- Ensure stable solutions to stakeholders by delivering automated testing solutions and quality practices within agreed time lines and within agreed risk parameters
- Provide advice to clients on quality practices
- Build and foster deep relationship with Peers, Subject Matter Experts, Developers, Product Owner and other Stakeholders though honest communication which align to the Nedbank Values
- Build a deep understanding of the domain in order to contribute to the ongoing value proposition
- Work closely with Quality Assurance Leads, Practise Leads, Developers, Architects, Product Owner and other Stakeholders to meet the expectations of our clients
- Participate in the overall PI planning and the squad deliverables including capacity estimation and interdependencies
- Obtain and review relevant artefacts from stakeholders (eg: technical landscape, architecture design, technology roadmaps)
- Create the Test Strategy, approach or plan and ensure alignment to the squad objectives
- Contribute to the systematic breakdown of the business needs into manageable feature(s), stories and epics that can be delivered
- Ensure all committed user stories and acceptance criteria are tested for the specific release ensuring quality is not compromised
- Participate in the backlog grooming and in the sprint planning
- Participate in the daily stand-up where necessary, manage the issues raised by the Software Quality & Test Engineers and raise relevant associated risks
- Encourage the Software Quality & Test Engineers to collaborate across squads to ensure efficient implementation of deliverables and ensure automation governance is adhered to by all
- Perform pull requests and ensure all feature branches are committed to Master
- Review that the test automation solution meets the architectural and development standards that are re-usable and scalable
- Challenging the business and technology solutions in alignment with client value proposition
- Ensure integration into and continuous test automation execution on DevOps pipelines
- Work with the Enterprise Quality Assurance Practise Lead on the metrics and reporting to communicate quality engineering practices
- Ensure the defect management process is adhered to by the Software Quality & Test Engineers
- Ensure artefacts are easy obtainable by storing all relevant artefacts in the repository
- Participate in the retrospective reviews and seek efficiencies which will ensure quicker delivery with high quality to our client(s)
- Encourage Peer reviews of the QA artefacts
- Understand and manage own demand based on expected timelines articulated by the line-management and project expectations

**Job Responsibilities Continue**
- Seek ongoing improvements in technical capabilities
- Ensure alignment of solution with emerging technologies and impact on Nedbank technologies
- Mentor the Engineers within the team to improve their technical capabilities
- Provide input into the documentation of standards & quality practices for Quality engineering for the organisation's current and future technological architecture
- Provide input into performance management of team members (e.g. performance contracts, development plans, poor performance and improvement plans, and review)
- Ensure the team dynamics are healthy (coaching and mentoring, assist with decision making, encourage self-organisation and assist with prioritisation)
- Support the achievement of the business strategy, objectives and values
- Obtain buy-in for developing new and/or enhanced processes (e.g. operational processes) that will improve the functioning of stakeholders' businesses by highlighting benefits in support of the implementation of recommendations
- Seek opportunities to improve business processes, models and systems though agile thinking
- Essential Qualifications - NQF Level
- Professional Qualifications/Honour’s Degree
- Preferred Qualification
- BSc IT or BComm IT or similar
- Preferred Certifications
- ISTQB Agile Foundation. ISTQB Advanced certification (preferred). Bootcamp training in Agile & DevOps.
- Minimum Experience Level
- Total number of years of experience:7 - 10 years
Management experience as part of the above years:1 - 2 years
Type of experience:Experience in Agile delivery and exposure to Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development in a continuous delivery model. Test analysis & design experience. 4 y