- Strategy & Planning : Define and own the end-to-end Test Strategy for Retail Media products. Champion a "Quality Engineering" mindset rather than just "Quality Assurance". Ensure that developed automation solutions meet maintainability, readability and extendibility requirements. Use your expertise to input into architecting, re-engineering and design of the quality automation solutions. Act as a subject matter expert for focus areas across the technology space.

- Transformation Leadership : Lead the transition from manual-heavy testing to a CI/CD-integrated automated testing model. Promote best practices for automation development. Work with the Architects and engineering teams to make technical trade off decisions.

- Execution & Oversight : Manage the planning and execution of all testing phases, including Functional, Non-Functional, E2E, Contract, and UAT.

- Team & Vendor Management : Mentor internal QA engineers and manage external vendor deliverables to ensure high standards.

- Stakeholder Management : Act as the primary point of contact for Product Owners and Business stakeholders, translating technical risks into business impact.

- Release Confidence : Define and own quality metrics and key performance indicators to determine the effectiveness of the Automation. Provide Go/No-Go recommendations based on data-driven quality metrics (not just gut feeling).

- Innovation and Technical Excellence : Actively look for the latest tools and technologies within or outside dunnhumby. Actively learn and help implementing the new industry standards related software quality automation.

Required Skills & Experience :

1. Strategic & Methodology :

- IT Transformation : Proven experience managing testing in complex transformation programmes (e.g., monolith to microservices, waterfall to agile).

- Agile Proficiency : Deep understanding of Scrum/Kanban, BDD (Behaviour Driven Development), Domain Driven Designs, and TDD.

- Shift-Left : Experience implementing quality checks early in the SDLC (static analysis, unit test coverage gates).

2. Test Automation & Tools (Must Have) :

- End-to-End (E2E) : Expert knowledge of modern JS/TS frameworks, specifically Cypress and Playwright.

- API Testing : Strong experience testing REST APIs using individual frameworks (e.g., xUnit for .NET, RestAssured, or similar).

- Contract Testing : Experience with Pact.io to ensure microservices compatibility.

- Unit Testing : Familiarity with guiding developers on unit test standards using MSTest/xUnit (.NET), Pytest (Python), or Jest (JavaScript).

- Component Testing : Experience running Cypress Component Tests.

- Integration : Experience running mocked tests using language frameworks and Docker containers for upstream service dependencies.

3. Observability & Performance :

- Synthetics : Experience setting up synthetic monitoring using New Relic or Selenium to monitor production health.

- Performance : Understanding of load/stress testing principles for high-traffic retail environments.

4. Domain Experience :

- Techno-Functional Balance : Ability to validate both the Business Logic (pricing, promotions, ad targeting) and the Technology (latency, API contracts, data flow).

Desirable Experience :

- Google Cloud Platform (GCP) : Experience testing cloud-native applications hosted on GCP (including familiarity with GKE, Cloud Functions, or Pub/Sub).

- Retail Media / Ad Tech : Experience working with Ad Servers.

- Tesco Ecosystem : Prior exposure to Tesco systems or the wider Grocery Retail sector