Lead Test Engineer

Your Role: Lead Test Engineer

Keeping our audiences entertained with their favourite podcasts, radio shows, video content and playlists, the Consumer Growth team builds best-in-class tech to help our teams create, finesse and deliver this content day after day. From internal studio tools to our Global Player product across mobile, smart speakers, smart TV and in-car platforms, we’re always looking for new ways to make our content look and sound great.

As a Lead Test Engineer in the Consumer Growth team at Global, reporting to the Head of Engineering, you will own the quality strategy for Global’s consumer-facing products, leading a team of QA Engineers and driving automation across Global Player and other key surfaces.

• Automation leadership (30%): Set the technical direction for our automated test suites across web and mobile, ensuring they provide a strong quality bar and fast, reliable feedback to engineering teams.

• Team leadership & development (25%): Line-manage and mentor QA Engineers, setting clear goals, supporting growth within our progression framework and fostering a culture of quality across the team.

• Quality ownership & releases (25%): Own confidence in our releases, coordinating QA activity, triaging issues, tracking quality metrics such as bugs and incident rates, and reporting clearly to stakeholders.

• Test strategy & process improvement (20%): Work with other engineering leads to define and evolve our test strategy, identifying gaps in coverage, processes or tooling and proposing pragmatic improvements.

Think Big: Shape the end-to-end quality strategy for products used by millions, from Global Player to new consumer experiences across multiple platforms.

Own It: Take ownership of our quality gates and automated test suites, making clear, data-informed decisions that directly influence release readiness.

Keep it Simple: Design test approaches, pipelines and tooling that are maintainable, efficient and easy for engineers and QA to work with every day.

Better Together: Partner closely with engineering, product and delivery leads, building strong relationships and helping teams ship high-quality features at pace.

In your first few months, you’ll have:

• Taken ownership of our release quality gate and recommended clear, practical improvements to how we assess release readiness.

• Worked with your team to set meaningful, achievable growth goals within our progression framework.

• Built strong relationships with engineering and product leads, aligning on delivery plans and quality expectations.

• Established a roadmap for evolving our test strategy, CI/CD test pipelines and automated test suites across platforms.

What You’ll Need

• Automated testing: Strong experience writing and maintaining automated tests for web and mobile applications. Experience with TypeScript or Python is essential; familiarity with tools such as Appium and/or Playwright is highly beneficial.

• Quality engineering mindset: A solid understanding of reliability, performance and user experience considerations across a range of client platforms.

• CI/CD experience: Hands-on experience integrating test suites into CI/CD pipelines and improving how and when tests run.

• Test suite performance: Experience optimising test suite runtimes, including test case parallelism and other performance techniques.

• Scalable test architecture: Knowledge of how to architect large test suites for maintainability, clarity and minimal duplication.

• AI curiosity: An interest in exploring AI engineering techniques to increase efficiency in test design, test data generation and agent-based quality checks.

• Testing craft: Strong experience designing test plans, identifying edge cases and running effective exploratory testing.

• Leadership & mentoring: Experience leading or mentoring test or QA engineers, influencing technical direction and ways of working.

• Cloud & tooling awareness: A basic understanding of AWS infrastructure, Kubernetes and modern engineering tooling, or a willingness to learn.