QA Lead

Prudential's purpose is to be partners for every life and protectors for every future.

The QA Lead is responsible for driving an organisation-wide transformation toward built-in quality, automation-first development, and engineering excellence.

Job Responsibilities

Quality Engineering Strategy

• Define and implement the enterprise-wide Quality Engineering strategy aligned with “Shift-Left” and “Automation-First” principles.
• Establish the “Golden Standard” for test automation, quality gates, and SDLC best practices across all squads.
• Drive the transformation from manual QA to automation-led quality engineering (<10% QA headcount of total engineering).

Technical Leadership

• Build and maintain high-quality automation frameworks, test infrastructure, and reusable tooling used by all product squads.
• Coach and uplift engineering squads to achieve self-testing capability, reducing dependency on centralized testers.
• Introduce metrics (e.g., defect leakage, cycle time impacted by QA, automation coverage) to ensure continuous improvement.

Operational Leadership

• Manage a pool of QA engineers who will be allocated to squads based on roadmap and complexity.
• Establish Quality Chapter governance,facilitate best practice sharing, standards alignment, and skill uplift.
• Partner with Product Engineering, Digital Engineering, Platform Engineering, and SRE teams to ensure quality is embedded end-to-end.

People & Vendor Management

• Build talent pathways for automation engineers, including upskilling programs for manual QA transitioning to automation.
• Manage vendor partners for specialist testing (e.g., accessibility, performance, security) where needed.
• Implement workforce planning based on demand across squads.

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years in software quality engineering with at least 5 years in a leadership role.
• Deep experience in test automation frameworks (e.g., Cypress, Playwright, Selenium), API testing and CI/CD integration.
• Strong understanding of modern cloud-native engineering practices (microservices, DevOps, IaC).
• Proven experience elevating engineering maturity or leading quality transformation in a squad/tribe model.