QA Engineer Lead

About the Role

We are looking for a QA Engineer Lead to define and drive Bestway's quality standards and test automation strategy. You will build a modern, automation-first QA practice, using AI tools to make testing faster, broader and more reliable, so that every release is verifiably stable before production.

About Bestway

Bestway Group is a diversified multinational family owned business with annualised turnover in excess of £4.5 billion. Starting off as a chain of retail convenience stores, the Group has grown to become a diversified multinational business with interests across the wholesale, pharmacy, real estate, cement and banking sectors. The Group is also the largest overseas investor in Pakistan.

Owned by the Pervez, Choudrey and Sheikh families, Bestway Group was founded in 1976 by Sir Anwar Pervez OBE H Pk, who remains Chairman. Serving over 12 million customers and employing over 28,000 individuals, the Group supports and serves communities through its operations across the UK, Pakistan and the Middle East

What You'll Do

• QA strategy & standards: Define the test strategy, quality standards and "definition of done" across applications, covering unit, integration, contract, API, end-to-end and non-functional testing (performance, security basics).
• Test automation: Design and build the automation framework and embed it in CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions) as quality gates, with clear coverage targets and reliable, low-flakiness suites.
• AI-enabled testing: Evaluate and introduce AI tools to generate test cases and test data, maintain and self-heal automated tests, analyse failures, and improve coverage from requirements and code changes. Set guidelines for validating AI-generated tests so that speed does not come at the cost of trust.
• Shift-left collaboration: Work with the Lead Application Architect and developers to build testability into design, support contract testing between services, and improve unit and integration test practices.
• Release confidence: Define release-readiness criteria, regression strategy and quality metrics (defect escape rate, coverage, pipeline stability, mean time to detect) and report them clearly to management.
• Team leadership: Coach developers and testers on testing best practices, and grow QA capability across the team. This role may include line management as the function grows.

The Ideal Candidate

• Significant experience in QA / test engineering, including substantial experience owning test automation frameworks in production-grade environments.
• Strong hands-on automation skills (e.g. Playwright/Selenium for UI; REST Assured, Postman or similar for API; Java or TypeScript/JavaScript).
• Experience with contract testing (e.g. Pact) and testing microservices and event-driven systems.
• Solid CI/CD knowledge, with experience integrating tests into pipelines.
• Experience defining test strategy and quality standards at team or organisation level.
• Practical experience with, or strong interest in, AI-assisted testing tools.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to influence developers and stakeholders and to explain quality risks in business terms.

Desirable

• Performance testing (e.g. k6, JMeter) and basic security testing experience.
• Experience with Azure and containerised applications.
• ISTQB or similar certification.
• Experience leading or mentoring QA teams.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Pension
• 22 days annual leave, plus bank holidays
• Onsite parking
• Life assurance

We understand that no applicant ever ticks every box so please do consider applying should some or most of the above apply. Bestway Group is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity and inclusion. We welcome people of different nationalities, backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We want strong, and diverse teams built from talented individuals with different backgrounds identities and experiences.

If this is of interest to you and you would like to learn more, please do get in touch, we are looking forward to hearing from you.