About
Strategic Principal Software Quality Assurance leader with over a decade of experience transforming complex, multi-team delivery environments through automation-first, shift-left practices to accelerate delivery, enhance reliability, and improve user-centred outcomes. Leverages data-driven decision-making and pragmatic coaching to embed quality early, modernise engineering workflows, and establish scalable standards across diverse agile models, evidenced by a 50% increase in test coverage and 75% reduction in defect leakage.
Work
CDL Ltd
|Principal QA / Test Manager
Stockport, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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Summary
Led strategic Quality Assurance activities and test strategy across core retail products in a regulated data-driven insurance environment, impacting twelve teams and five products.
Highlights
Spearheaded quality strategy, increasing test coverage from 60% to 90%, reducing defect leakage from 8% to less than 2%, and sustaining 80% B2B customer satisfaction within 24 months.
Drove cultural transformation, embedding quality early to enhance speed and stability, and fostered best practices by leading an internal QA Community of Practice, boosting engagement and cross-team standardization.
Provided deep coaching and mentorship to multiple onshore and offshore teams across various products, ensuring continuous quality delivery at enterprise scale.
Managed and developed QA talent within a matrix framework, successfully recruiting and onboarding professionals through structured, scorecard-based assessments.
Developed and implemented an automated dashboard to report comprehensive quality data to department heads, visually representing code coverage and identifying improvement areas for strategic stakeholder discussions.
Architected and deployed automation strategies leveraging test pyramid and quadrant heuristics, integrating them into CI/CD pipelines to optimize scalability, security, reliability, and efficiency.
Built scalable UI/API automation frameworks (Cypress, Selenium, SOAP UI, Groovy), performance testing benchmarks (Gatling, JUnit), and integrated Pipeline Security Scanning (SAST/DAST) within Gitlab.
Collaborated with Cyber Security, Legal, and Compliance to deliver synthetic data at scale, ensuring audit, test data, and access controls met all stringent stakeholder and legal requirements.
Co-Operative Banking Group
|UAT Test Lead
Manchester, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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Summary
Led User Acceptance Testing (UAT) initiatives within the banking sector, coordinating stakeholders and testers to validate system functionality and business requirements.
Highlights
Managed and executed comprehensive UAT cycles for critical banking systems, ensuring alignment with business needs and regulatory compliance.
Coordinated cross-functional teams and external stakeholders, facilitating efficient defect resolution and successful application deployments.
Education
Imperial College of Science, Teechnology and Medicine
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BSc (Hons)
Biochemistry
Certificates
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Issued By
AWS
Advanced Test Analyst
Issued By
ISTQB
Skills
Quality Assurance & Strategy
QA Leadership, Quality Engineering Strategy, Shift-Left, Continuous Testing, Automation-First Delivery, Test Pyramid, Test Quadrants, Risk-Based Testing, Exploratory Testing, Data-driven Decisions, Governance & Reporting, Performance Management, Stakeholder Management.
Test Automation Frameworks
Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, SOAP UI, Karate, Postman, Bruno, JavaScript, Typescript, Groovy.
Performance & Security Testing
Gatling Performance Testing, Gatling, JUnit, Pipeline Security Scanning, SAST, DAST.
DevOps & CI/CD
CI/CD, GitLab, GitHub, Jenkins, SDLC, DevOps, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, BDD, TDD, Hybrid Teams, Remote Teams.
Cloud & AI Technologies
AWS Kiro AI, Q Developer, MS CoPilot Pro/Office 365, GitHub CoPilot, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Prompt Engineering.