DESCRIPTION

The Commercial & Digital team is responsible for developing and growing UKTV’s revenue streams across sales, distribution, advertising and sponsorship, ventures and digital.
The Digital team are tasked with developing, evolving and implementing UKTV’s VoD and digital strategy covering U digital products and platforms, and partnerships.
The team consists of multi-disciplined, talented individuals across several different units: Curation, Product and Production & Development. We are tasked with developing a world-class BVOD service, as well as complementary digital products and partnerships to grow audiences and contribute to the long-term profitability of UKTV.
We’ve experienced rapid growth in our VoD views in 2024, topping 460 million views last year, averaging 1.3 billion viewing minutes a month and almost 6 million registered users. We have ambitious plans to become a VoD destination: delivering new content, features, and functionality to U, our owned and operated VoD product, FAST channels and our pay platform partners.
Purpose of the role
As Lead Software Quality Engineer, you will be accountable for both the technical and strategic aspects of quality assurance, working on the U VoD app across web, mobile and connected TVs. Leading a team of 4 Quality Assurance Engineers embedded in product squads, this role requires a blend of hands-on-coding, leadership, strategic thinking and close collaboration with the broader team.
You’ll drive the evolution of test automation strategies, implement best practices across platforms, and refine team processes, while championing Agile principles. This role emphasises continuous quality improvement, leveraging a data-driven approach to deliver exceptional results.

EXPERIENCE

• Experience of leading, managing and inspiring a QA team with a focus on growth and development and fostering a continuous improvement mindset.
• Significant demonstrable experience implementing new strategies to meet evolving capability requirements as a product scales, within QA and engineering.
• With a data driven mindset, experience using analytics to monitor and report on test coverage, defect trends and quality metrics at a strategic level, to inform decision making.
• Proven experience designing, building and maintaining an automated testing framework and onging automation processes.
• Extensive experience with automation tools, to include Suitest, combined with a proven ability to identify, evaluate, and onboard innovative automation solutions tailored to various platforms.
• Advocating for continuous integrations / delivery (CI/CD) and ensuring automated tests are integrated into the pipeline.
• Understanding of the Agile Manifesto, including the values and principles, and extensive hands-on experience working in this environment.
• Managed end-to-end testing activities within an Agile development team.
• Developed and enhanced quality assurance capabilities across QA and engineering teams while promoting and embedding a quality first mindset.
• Coached teams to adopt behaviour driven development (BDD) / test driven development (TDD).
• Worked with developers, product owners and other stakeholders to ensure quality is built into the software development lifecycle, with a shift-left testing approach.
• Experience in manual testing, debugging and troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in creating API testing, security testing, performance testing and CI/CD pipelines.
• Extensive experience testing across multiple platforms, to include at least two of the following, web, connected TVs and mobile.
• Know how and when to escalate critical issues in a clear manner and with a sense of urgency, following through to resolution.
• Demonstrated experience in effectively communicating with and influencing both team members and stakeholders.
• Creating a culture that fosters continuous improvement and development and growth.

KNOWLEDGE

• Excellent knowledge of the software development life cycle (SDLC).
• Knowledge and expertise in programming languages, Python, JavaScript, Java, along with testing tools and frameworks, e.g. Browserstack, Appium, Selenium, Playwright.
• Excellent knowledge of analytics tools data engineering practices.
• Good knowledge of CI / CD practices.
• Deep understanding of QA processes, defect life cycles and release management.
• Knowledge and experience working with AWS (Amazon Web Services).
• Understanding of the Scrum Guide, to include principles and events.

SKILLS & PERSONAL QUALITIES

• Role model the desired behaviours and set the standards for those around you.
• Drive collaborative working across teams to deliver value for our audiences.
• Strong analytical skills, using data to inform your decisions and improve quality across the products.
• Be bold and decisive; adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and be prepared to take risks.
• Proactively identify and develop capabilities within your team.
• Create and maintain a psychologically safe environment, ensuring all perspectives are valued and exclusive behaviour is challenged.
• Excellent organisational skills, with the ability to manage numerous complex tasks simultaneously.
• Staying up to date with current testing strategies and adopting a test-and-learn approach, constantly seeking new tools to improve outcomes.
• Remain calm under pressure and focused on delivering quality despite facing challenges.

WHAT YOU WILL GET TO WORK ON….KEY OUTPUTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE ROLE

• Lead a high performing team, providing them with clear goals and direction. Work to inspire, empower, motivate, and develop your team, whilst fostering an inclusive environment where they can perform at their best and take ownership.
• Provide strategic leadership for the overall QA process, along with driving implementation of new strategic initiatives.
• Lead on the analysis and reporting of quality metrics, surfacing any trends emerging within the data. To include post live analysis
• Ensure the product meets quality standards by aligning testing processes with business requirements and user expectations, ensuring exceptional resilience and quality to the product.
• Drive a shift left testing approach and coach on the chosen test strategy, whilst embedding a shared responsibility of quality across squads.
• Lead on test strategy creation and implementation, including test planning, test case design and defect management.
• Take ownership of the test data strategy to ensure it effectively supports testing efforts.
• Design and maintain automated testing frameworks and tools, implementing a suitable automation process alongside and ensuring a high test automation coverage and integration into the CI/CD pipeline.
• Build out tools and frameworks, to enable efficient testing, always with an eye on how to support on future requirements.
• Act as a bridge between development and testing teams.
• Understand the latest opportunities AI tools can offer and how these can be applied to support on the team’s goals.
• Support the team, knowing when to assist in regression testing across multiple connected TV devices and mobile devices.
• Foster and support a test-and-learn culture within a psychologically safe environment.
• Champion a shared sense of quality across the team.
• Manage the testing area in the office, ensuring the team and stakeholders have access to the appropriate, functional devices needed for testing.