Company Description

The British Airways (BA) Architecture & Engineering team is part of BA Digital within the International Airlines Group (IAG), one of the world’s leading airline groups and owner of some of the biggest brands in the sky.

Our vision is to delight customers, enable our colleagues, accelerate business performance, increase shareholder value, and protect our business through the innovative and agile use of technology and data to become the most trusted digital airline.

Software Quality Assurance is part of Software Engineering team. We’re a small team, but we’ve got a big vision: to redefine how we build our software and to ensure we deliver value to customers and stakeholders in a secure and scalable way. There are a lot of challenges – but a lot of opportunities to think and act creatively, too.

Together we are building a better BA (British Airways).

Job Description

Purpose of the role

This is a key hire for the team and we are looking for a candidate who can drive software QA engineering strategy and set standards for our product teams. You will be working in a central software engineering team performing a critical role to ensure that we are building the right products and with security considerations from the ground up. You will regularly engage with 3rd party and Suppliers and be responsible for identifying opportunities for continuous improvement.
 

Key Responsibilities and Tasks

• Develop software quality assurance strategy by defining a quality vision for software engineering practice, aligned to business goals and objectives.
• Own testing and quality management governance for our product channels.
• Collaborate with the Product teams to set the standards on Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, and to ensure testability for the features within a release.
• Act as the quality evangelist deploying a strong Agile testing mindset, collaborating with stakeholders to ensure high quality, high value solutions are delivered for the business.
• Collaborate with team members ensuring a Shift Left approach to quality, working closely with all engineers to define the optimum automation strategy.
• Conduct Root Cause Analysis with Operations, Service, Support, and other relevant stakeholders and lead quality initiatives to prevent similar incidents.
• Create environments that enable and encourage Continuous Improvement/Development and DevSecOps ways of working, taking input from process owners and other subject matter experts to gain a great understanding of business ways of working and challenges.
• Provide support to the Software and QA Engineers, guide them in implementing and delivering the vision through effective planning, unblocking obstacles, and providing coaching.
• Ensure the team have transparent quality reporting, to demonstrate the automated test coverage at each level, the execution results and easy-to-read outputs.
• Develop growth plans for the team to foster their career development and advancement.
• Review the skill and expertise requirements to accomplish team goals and identify staffing and talent resources to fill project roles.
• Consider and evaluate potential package “off the shelf” solutions in association with IAG Tech Architecture to achieve the defined requirements (including piloting, prototyping and assessing cost of potential solutions).

This role may require travel and working from multiple sites/locations. You must be willing and able to
travel to participate in meetings, workshops, and other related activities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computing science or equivalent experience

Skills

• Proficiency in various test methodologies and execution
• Forming strong stakeholder relationships, with a proven ability of influencing team members to adopt quality mindset
• Effective team leadership and development skills
• Effective stakeholder management, balancing and finding compromises between opposing views and opinions
• Ability to recognize priorities and guide others towards the accomplishment of strategic business goals and objectives
• Dynamic, problem-solving approach coupled with the ability to create a positive working environment.
• Innovation - transforming industry trends into practical, cost effective solutions
• Identifies and contributes to the continual improvement of software engineering capability across the organization
• Fluent written and spoken English

Experience

• Experience of working in an Agile environment, working closely with Product and other engineers to develop optimal testing coverage.
• Proven track record of analyzing complex solutions and devising the appropriate test strategies for these solutions.
• Experience of leading QA engineers to deliver on time and budget
• Knowledge of industry best practice on software development methodologies
• Experience in translating complex business requirements into system design, considering technical environment(s), ability of user group to interact with the system and expected life and volatility of system.
• Experience in an agile and/or DevSecOps environment, including unit testing, behaviour driven development, and continuous integration/continuous deployment
• Demonstrable experience in defining software metrics and using Static Code Analysis (eg. SonarCloud) or similar tools (eg. CodeScene, Compass) to identify and improve software quality.
• Proven application of a variety of different approaches to functional testing: Automation, Exploratory, Scripted etc.
• Automation experience across applications (FE, API, BE), end to end, functional, non-functional and regression testing.
• Experience of operating across multiple countries and cultures is desirable, but not essential.