Responsibilities:

• Leading two teams
  
  • Manage eight people across QA and Escalations; assigning, prioritising and monitoring workload daily across both queues.
  • Run regular 1:1s and quarterly performance reviews for both teams, giving direct, useful feedback and reporting on individual and team performance.
  • Coach team members along genuine upskilling paths.
  • Build on teams that already run well. Your job is to give that structure direction and formal ownership.
  • Assess capability and capacity across both teams early, develop the strengths already there, and make the case for growth where the workload justifies it. We expect day-to-day triage to sit within the team, with you setting the policy and arbitrating the hard calls.
  • Monitor workflow and capacity trends across both teams, and flag early when recruitment or capacity changes are needed.
  • Onboard and mentor new team members.

   

   

• Owning quality (QA)
  
  • Own and defend the standard of quality that leaves SimplePay, and the QA team's reputation for accuracy across the organisation.
  • Set and maintain the standard for QA and Production Testing, including how results are documented on Jira tickets and in dedicated QA reports for larger features.
  • Act as the routing point for work entering QA and distribute it across the team.
  • Identify and escalate inconsistencies between specs, designs and implementation, and push back formally when an issue belongs with a Business Analyst, developer or another team.
  • Handle last-minute and compliance-critical testing under tight deadlines, statutory deadlines do not move.
  • Plan and expand automated end-to-end test coverage in Playwright and TypeScript, review test pull requests, and structure parallel automation workstreams across the team.
  • Drive CI integration and evaluate new approaches.

   

   

• Owning resolution (Escalations)
  
  • Own the escalations process end to end, and continuously improve it for efficiency, speed and quality.
  • Set and enforce triage and prioritisation policy across the queue, from processing payroll or filing, through to low-impact issues, and personally arbitrate the hard calls.
  • Ensure the team meets its response and resolution commitments, and that customers, internal teams and management are kept genuinely informed while an issue is open.
  • Review escalations before they go to the development, Business Analysis or Legal Advisory teams, so that what arrives is well-evidenced, correctly prioritised and actionable.
  • Represent escalated customer issues to the development team in the daily standup and the weekly priority meeting.
  • Oversee monitoring and actioning of the exceptions dashboard and the daily sanity checks.
  • Make sure root causes are addressed and preventative measures put in place, not just that individual tickets close.

   

   

• Connecting the two
  
  • Close the loop between escalated defects and test coverage. Every recurring escalation is a gap, and you are the person positioned to see both sides and act on it.
  • Own the shared technical ground both teams work on.
  • Improve and standardise documentation across both teams.
  • Report meaningfully on both functions. Defect escape rate, escalation volumes and ageing, automation coverage, and team capacity.
  • Working across teams
  • Liaise with Business Analysts, Knowledge Management, Legal Advisory, Finance and developers to close specification gaps before they become defects and escalations.
  • Advocate for process improvements and see them through.

   

   

Requirements:

• At least 10 years in software quality assurance, technical support, escalations or a closely related field.
• At least 4 years in a formal people-management role with direct reports, including running 1:1s and formal performance reviews.
• Experience leading more than one team, or a single team with two distinct functions.
• A genuinely technical background. You can read a stack trace, reason about a database-level data issue, review test automation code, and challenge an investigation's conclusions on the evidence.
• Hands-on experience with test automation frameworks; Playwright, Cypress or Selenium; and working proficiency in JavaScript or TypeScript, sufficient to review pull requests and set technical direction.
• Demonstrated experience running an interrupt-driven, SLA-bound queue; incident management, escalations, technical support or similar, including triage and prioritisation under pressure.
• Excellent written communication, including customer-facing incident communication.
• Proven ability to delegate and build depth rather than absorbing everything yourself.
• Abundant self-drive, with the ability to take ownership and deliver quality results in a fast-paced, deadline-driven environment.
• Experience working in a hybrid or fully remote, high-performing team.
• ISTQB certification or a relevant formal QA qualification.
• Experience in payroll, fintech, accounting or another compliance-heavy domain, where being wrong has consequences beyond a poor user experience.
• Experience with multi-region or multi-tenant products.
• Experience with Jira, Confluence, Sentry, Freshdesk (or a comparable helpdesk), Postman and GitHub.
• SQL or comparable data-investigation ability; enough to interrogate a data issue rather than only escalate it.
• Experience owning a defect escape rate, an SLA, or a comparable quality metric, and improving it.
• Experience bringing documentation, process and metrics up to standard.
• Experience testing RESTful APIs and mobile applications (Android and iOS).