QA Automation Lead - Cape Town

We use our expertise and products to craft customer experiences. Our range of services helps global brand acquire, engage and retain choice-rich customers.

© 2023 Collinson International Limited. Registered in England & Wales under registration No. 2577557

Registered address : 3 More London Riverside, London, SE1 2AQ, United Kingdom.

Collinson is a global loyalty and benefits company.

We use our expertise and products to craft customer experiences which enable some of the world’s best known brands to acquire, engage and retain the most demanding and choice-rich customers. In particular, our unique expertise and insight into high earning, frequent travellers allows us to create products and solutions for our clients that inspire greater customer engagement to drive more profitable relationships, enrich their travel experiences, protect what matters and assist in in times of need.

While specialising in Financial Services, Travel and Retail, we also support clients in multiple sectors. We have worked with over 90 airlines, 20 hotel groups and more than 600 financial institutions and banks, with clients including Accor Hotels, Air France KLM, American Express, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Diners Club, Mandarin Oriental, Mastercard, Radisson Hotel Group, Sephora, Visa and Vhi.

We take our 30 years’ experience working with these kinds of household names in over 170 countries, and help our clients to deliver the smarter experiences it takes to differentiate their propositions, and help them win deeper devotion with their customers.

Collinson is a privately-owned entrepreneurial business with 2,000 passionate people working in 20 locations worldwide.  Our solutions include Priority Pass, the world’s best known airport experiences programme, while we are also the trusted partner behind many of the leading financial services, airline and hotel brand’s reward programmes and loyalty initiatives.

Purpose of the job

We’re looking for a QA Automation Lead who’s passionate about quality; not just as a phase, but as a core part of how great software gets built. In this role, you’ll help shape what “great” looks like across our engineering teams, including setting test standards, supporting engineers and making sure quality is everyone’s responsibility.

You’ll be embedded in a collaborative environment where software is shipped fast, iteratively, and often. Your work will focus on making sure things don’t just work but work well together. You’ll bring clarity, structure and confidence to the way we test by balancing automation with human insight and keeping the end-user in mind.

Your role would straddle multiple engineering squads, supporting with not just the QA strategy, but personally leading the automated testing efforts as well. You’ll bring your considerable knowledge of test automation to help us build new products that are reliable, performant, and resilient.

If you’re curious, love asking the awkward questions, and want to support software engineers build and iterate quickly, you’ll thrive here.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and uphold the standards for test quality across engineering squads, ensuring consistency and confidence in our releases.
• Oversee the work of our Automation QAs / SDeTs, and manual testers.
• Write high quality integration and end-to-end tests across our software portfolio.
• Partner with engineers, product managers, and delivery leads to embed quality thinking from day one, and not as an after-thought.
• Design and oversee test strategies that combine automation, exploratory testing, and regression coverage.
• Drive the implementation and evolution of automated testing frameworks, ensuring integration into our CI / CD pipelines.
• Own the structure and health of test suites and regression packs, helping teams keep them lean, relevant, and valuable.
• Support squads in front-end, API, and end-to-end testing, using tools like Playwright, Cypress, Postman, RestAssured and other modern frameworks.
• Facilitate and promote BDD and 3-amigos sessions, helping clarify requirements and prevent misunderstandings before they happen.
• Help engineers understand and own quality; coaching without gatekeeping, advising without blocking.
• Perform and organise performance testing with tools such as K6, JMeter.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to ensure cross-squad functionality and integration is properly tested.
• Get involved in the testing cycle, helping to investigate issues, write tests, support on manual QA, and signing-off changes.

Preferred

Non Negotiable

Personal Attributes

Interview Process

We want our process to be fair and transparent, so it’s only right that we tell you what the various interview stages are :

Stage 1 – We'll do a screener call with our recruitment team, where you can learn a bit more about Collinson, our values and we can confirm what you’re looking for in a new role.

Stage 2 – We'll do a short call with one of our Engineering Managers for around 30 minutes, who will tell you more about the team, our projects and ask questions about your career history and suitability for the role.

Stage 3 – You will do a technical test (at home), and we’ll review your solution and approach to it.

Stage 4 – This is final and main stage, where we’ll meet you for around 1 hour, and you’ll get to spend time with different members of the engineering team (Engineering Manager and QA Test Lead). We’ll also go through your technical test and ask questions on some of your decisions and implementation.

Stage 5 - 30 minute discussion with our Head of Architecture & Engineering