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Quality Lead
Department: Tech - Engineering
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Zinc - London
Compensation: £72,000 / year
Description
Zinc is looking for a Quality Lead to improve the quality of our product and the way we test it. This is the first hire into a new team, and it's an exciting place to come in: you'll define what Quality Engineering looks like at Zinc. 🚀
Zinc runs a Quality Assistance model. Engineers own the quality of what they ship, and that ownership sits at the same level as anyone whose job title has the word quality in it. You'll be the person who makes that model work, and who builds the foundation underneath it.
The early months are about getting close to the codebase and the team. You'll work out where quality breaks down today, and build the regression coverage that catches those failures before a customer ever sees them. A large part of the job is coaching engineers to test their own work well. As the function settles, you'll start hiring a small team around you.
Key Responsibilities 🗝️
- Finding where quality breaks down 🔍 – Assess problem areas across the product and the engineering process, and work out where the real risk is concentrated.
- Building the safety net 🛡️ – Design and maintain regression test plans that give the team the confidence to ship at pace.
- Coaching engineers to test 🎓 – Train and support engineers so that good testing happens inside the pull request, which is what makes Quality Assistance actually work.
- Solving the hard cases 🧩 – Devise tools and approaches for the complicated scenarios that standard testing patterns can't reach.
- Building reliable test environments 🛠️ – Work with third-party tools to create mock systems and dependable test scenarios for the parts of the platform that are hardest to get at.
- Raising the bar across the SDLC 📈 – Introduce and embed quality best practices at every stage of the software development life cycle.
- Reporting on quality 📊 – Track and report the metrics that show how healthy the product really is, then use them to find the next process improvement.
- Building the team 🌱 – Grow a team of two to four people, starting with the hiring.
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Skills, Knowledge and Expertise 🚀
Hard skills ⚡
- Quality Assistance 🧪 – Experience embedding quality practice inside engineering teams, where the engineers do the testing and your job is to raise their ceiling.
- Test Strategy & Regression Planning 📋 – You've designed testing strategy and regression plans from a blank page, for a product already in customers' hands.
- Test Tooling & Mocking 🔧 – Comfortable with third-party tools for building mocks and dependable scenarios across complex or awkward systems.
- Compliance Experience ✅ – You've worked inside a compliance-driven organisation, and you understand how compliance gets maintained within a platform over time rather than signed off once.
- Metrics & Reporting 📈 – You can define and report the quality metrics that give leadership a genuine read on product health.
Tech Stack 💻
- JavaScript / TypeScript — day-to-day language for writing and maintaining automated tests. Comfort here is a requirement, not a nice-to-have.
- Cypress — front-end end-to-end testing — already in use at Zinc, so the person inherits this rather than choosing it.
- Playwright — or an equivalent JS-based E2E framework. Named alongside Cypress as the kind of tooling we want more depth in.
- Jest — back-end testing.
- Vitest — front-end component testing.
- CircleCI / CI-CD — comfortable in pipelining work
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Soft skills ✨
- A Natural Teacher 👩🏫 – You get real satisfaction from raising the skill level of the engineers around you, and you're patient with the people who need it most.
- Highly Collaborative 🌊 – You work inside engineering every day, alongside product and design, and you treat quality as something the whole team carries.
- Process-Minded 🎯 – You spot the opportunities to improve how we work across the SDLC, and you know how to land a change once you've found it.
- Kind & Supportive ❤️ – You build a positive, respectful culture around you, lifting others up and working with humility.
What we offer 🍉
- 24 days holiday + Bank Holidays + your birthday off 🎉
- £1200 annual benefits allowance (ThanksBen, from month 2)
- Early finish Fridays (16:00)
- Yearly company retreat abroad ✈️
- 30 days to Work from anywhere 🌍
- Enhanced Maternity, Paternity, and Adoption Leave (13 weeks full pay, 17 weeks half pay, then SMP for maternity, 1 month full pay for paternity/adoption) 🐣
- Statutory pension with NEST (3% employer, 5% employee)
- Zinc shares, issued through the EMI Scheme
- Unlimited access to Spill Therapy
- Company socials, quarterly team socials Free Monday lunches
- Nursery workplace benefit scheme (Yellownest)
- Option to lease an electric car through Electric Car Scheme
- Celebrated Zinc anniversaries 🥳
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