Test and Automation Principal/Lead
- Manchester
- £80,000 per year
- Permanent
- Full-time
- Lead the Testing Centre of Excellence to drive best practices, consistent standards, and strategic direction for all aspects of testing-both manual and automated-across all squads.
- Define and maintain the overall test strategy, ensuring that quality is embedded throughout the software delivery lifecycle and that no gaps exist in test coverage or approach across the platform.
- Line manages a team of manual test analysts and automation testers who are embedded within agile delivery squads, supporting their career development, coaching, and technical growth.
- While squad leads are responsible for day-to-day work allocation, you're accountable for ensuring that testing is carried out to a consistently high standard, aligned to the organisation's testing strategy, tooling, and processes.
- Collaborate closely with Technical Leads, Product Owners, and QA team members to ensure that testing practices support reliable, secure, and scalable delivery.
- Identifying and driving opportunities for test automation, continuous testing, and quality improvements, working hands-on where needed to implement tools, frameworks, or improvements that uplift testing capability across squads.
- Identifying and assessing new and emerging technologies, products, services, methods and techniques.
- Proven experience defining and executing QA strategies that blend manual and automated testing; able to lead testing initiatives end-to-end across the SDLC.
- Hands-on experience writing and maintaining automated functional/E2E tests using TypeScript and Jest, with a focus on stability and maintainability.
- Experience designing and executing performance and load tests using tools like JMeter, with a deep understanding of interpreting metrics and tuning systems.
- Strong manual testing background with a knack for identifying edge cases, usability issues, and high-risk areas; able to guide exploratory testing efforts when automation is insufficient.
- Experience setting up test data strategies, using fixtures/factories, and implementing mocks/stubs for services, APIs, and external dependencies to support reliable automation.
- Deep integration of test suites into CI/CD pipelines, enabling early feedback and fail-fast workflows; collaborates with developers to promote testability and quality from the start.
- Leads by example with code, test design, and reviews; mentors testers and developers in quality practices, and fosters a culture of shared responsibility for quality.
- Agile development methodologies
- Application lifecycle management: Jira, Confluence
- Monitoring tools, including Grafana, Kibana
- Executing tests in line with test plans
- Writing test plans, scripts and cases
- Test management
- Test data management
- Test progress and outcome reporting
- Performance testing, including tools, e.g., JMeter
- Knowledge and experience of target platform, e.g.
- Microservices, APIs, etc
- Source control: Git, GitLab
- Javascript/Typescript
- Javascript runtime and package management, e.g., Node, NPM, etc
- Automated functional testing (e.g., Jest, Cypress, Playwright, etc.)
- Hybrid working (minimum of 2 days in the office per week)
- 24 days holiday (+ 8 bank holidays)
- Annual bonus scheme
- Enhanced maternity and adoption leave
- Company pension with up to 8% N Brown contribution
- Mental Health support both internally and externally, including access to our wellbeing champions and counselling services
- A range of financial wellbeing support
- Colleague discount across all N Brown brands
- Onsite café with subsidised rates and local restaurant discounts!
- Life Assurance and Private Medical Insurance
- Paid volunteer time - all our colleagues can take a full day paid to volunteer for a charity of their choice