PSA | QA Lead

Prudential’s purpose is to be partners for every life and protectors for every future. Our purpose encourages everything we do by creating a culture in which diversity is celebrated and inclusion assured, for our people, customers, and partners. We provide a platform for our people to do their best work and make an impact to the business, and we support our people’s career ambitions. We pledge to make Prudential a place where you can Connect, Grow, and Succeed.

The QA Lead  is responsible for driving an organisation‑wide transformation toward built‑in quality, automation-first development, and engineering excellence. This role leads the Quality & Engineering Excellence pillar and manages a pool of QA Automation Engineers who will be embedded across product squads. The individual ensures squads adopt modern quality engineering practices and significantly reduce reliance on manual testing.

Job Responsibilities

Quality Engineering Strategy

• Define and implement the enterprise-wide Quality Engineering strategy aligned with “Shift‑Left” and “Automation‑First” principles.
• Establish the “Golden Standard” for test automation, quality gates, and SDLC best practices across all squads.
• Drive the transformation from manual QA to automation-led quality engineering (<10% QA headcount of total engineering).

Technical Leadership

• Build and maintain high-quality automation frameworks, test infrastructure, and reusable tooling used by all product squads.
• Coach and uplift engineering squads to achieve self-testing capability, reducing dependency on centralized testers.
• Introduce metrics (e.g., defect leakage, cycle time impacted by QA, automation coverage) to ensure continuous improvement.

Operational Leadership

• Manage a pool of QA engineers who will be allocated to squads based on roadmap and complexity.
• Establish Quality Chapter governance—facilitate best practice sharing, standards alignment, and skill uplift.
• Partner with Product Engineering, Digital Engineering, Platform Engineering, and SRE teams to ensure quality is embedded end-to-end.

People & Vendor Management

• Build talent pathways for automation engineers, including upskilling programs for manual QA transitioning to automation.
• Manage vendor partners for specialist testing (e.g., accessibility, performance, security) where needed.
• Implement workforce planning based on demand across squads.

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years in software quality engineering with at least 5 years in a leadership role.
• Deep experience in test automation frameworks (e.g., Cypress, Playwright, Selenium), API testing and CI/CD integration.
• Strong understanding of modern cloud-native engineering practices (microservices, DevOps, IaC).
• Proven experience elevating engineering maturity or leading quality transformation in a squad/tribe model.

Prudential is an equal opportunity employer. We provide equality of opportunity of benefits for all who apply and who perform work for our organisation irrespective of sex, race, age, ethnic origin, educational, social and cultural background, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, disability or part-time / fixed-term work, or any other status protected by applicable law. We encourage the same standards from our recruitment and third-party suppliers taking into account the context of grade, job and location. We also allow for reasonable adjustments to support people with individual physical or mental health requirements.