QA & Escalations Team Lead

Our client is a fast-growing technology business operating within the Fintech and payments environment. They are seeking an experienced QA & Escalations Team Lead to take ownership of two critical functions within the business: Quality Assurance and Software Escalations. This is a senior leadership position responsible for managing a team of eight specialists across QA and Technical Escalations. The successful candidate will be accountable for quality standards, technical investigations, workflow prioritization, team performance and continuous process improvement. 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). If you wish to apply for the position, please send your CV to Caleb Ebrahim at cebrahim@caglobalint.com.