Head of Quality Engineering (CPT Hybrid) at Datafin Recruitment

ENVIRONMENT:

• A dynamic Online Gambling Group seeks the technical expertise of a Head of Quality Engineer to fill a hands-on technical leadership role where you will own the technical quality engineering capability including taking charge of test automation frameworks, performance and non-functional testing, and the quality standards that every squad builds to.
• You will write and review automation and performance code, design frameworks, and set the technical direction for quality across the Java, .NET, React and Flutter stacks.
• The successful incumbent will require a Bachelor's Degree (NQF 7 or higher) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems or similar discipline with at least one recognised professional certification in Test or Performance Engineering, for example ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Automation Engineer or Technical Test Analyst) or an equivalent vendor certification in a performance tool.
• You will also need 10+ years in Software Engineering or Quality Engineering, of which at least 5 years hands-on building test automation frameworks and at least 3 years leading Performance and Load Testing on production-scale systems.

DUTIES:

• Roughly 60% of the role is hands-on technical work (framework code, performance engineering, reviews, pairing) and 40% is leadership (standards, coaching, planning, reporting).

Test Automation Leadership –

• Own the test automation strategy and the automation pyramid across the Java, .NET, React and Flutter stacks: unit, contract, API, integration, UI and mobile.
• Design, build and maintain the shared automation frameworks, libraries and test data tooling that squads consume; write production-quality code in these frameworks yourself.
• Define what "done" means for automated coverage on a change and enforce it through pull request review and CI quality gates.
• Drive flaky-test elimination, test execution time and pipeline reliability as engineering problems with measurable targets.

Performance and Non-functional Testing –

• Own Performance, Load, Stress, Soak and Resilience Testing across player-facing services and apps; design the test models, scripts and environments and run the tests.
• Establish performance baselines and SLOs per service, embed performance checks in CI, and diagnose bottlenecks with Engineers down to code, query and infrastructure level.
• Cover Security Testing (SAST/DAST Integration, Dependency scanning) and Accessibility Testing at the pipeline level in partnership with Security and UX.

Quality standards and Engineering practice –

• Set and publish the Quality Engineering standards: test strategy per squad, coverage expectations, environment and test data management, defect classification and exit criteria.
• Run quality reviews of squad delivery and hold Engineering Managers and Principal Engineers to the standards.
• Own quality metrics and reporting: escaped defects, change failure rate, test coverage, MTTR contribution, automation health; present them to engineering leadership monthly.
• Lead root-cause analysis of released defects and production incidents attributable to engineering, and turn findings into framework, pipeline or standards changes.

Coaching and capability –

• Upskill Engineers in test design, automation and performance engineering through pairing, code review, guilds and structured training.
• Provide functional leadership and technical direction to quality Engineers embedded in squads; contribute to their performance reviews and development plans.
• Act as the senior technical escalation point for quality risk on releases and give a clear go/no-go recommendation.

Tooling and AI augmentation –

• Own the quality tooling estate (test frameworks, performance tools, test management, observability integration) and its licence cost.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted test generation, test maintenance and defect analysis tooling, and set the guardrails for its use.

REQUIREMENTS:

Qualifications –

• Bachelor's Degree (NQF 7 or higher) in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Electrical/Electronic Engineering or a closely related discipline.
• An Honours or Master's Degree is an advantage.
• At least one recognised professional certification in Test or Performance Engineering, for example ISTQB Advanced Level (Test Automation Engineer or Technical Test Analyst) or an equivalent vendor certification in a performance tool.

Preferred qualifications:

• A Cloud Certification at Associate Level or above (AWS Certified Developer, Solutions Architect or DevOps Engineer preferred; Azure equivalents accepted).
• Certification in a CI/CD, container or infrastructure platform (Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Terraform).

Experience/Skills –

• 10+ Years in Software Engineering or Quality Engineering, of which at least 5 years hands-on building test automation frameworks and at least 3 years leading Performance and Load Testing on production-scale systems.
• At least 3 years leading Quality Engineering technically across multiple teams (Head of, Lead, Principal or equivalent), including setting standards adopted by Engineers who did not report to you.
• Professional Software Development experience in at least one of Java, C#/.NET or TypeScript, with code that ran in production. Candidates will be asked to show and discuss their own code.
• Experience embedding quality into a continuous delivery pipeline: quality gates, test parallelisation, environment provisioning and test data management.
• Experience with mobile test automation (Flutter, native iOS/Android or React Native) is strongly preferred given the mobile product estate.

Advantageous –

• Experience in a regulated, high-availability consumer environment (Online Gaming, FinTech, eCommerce, telecoms).