Senior Test Lead / Manager - Insurance

We have a new Senior Test Lead / Manager contract role with a top company in Dublin offering hybrid remote work and top day rates.

The role is responsible for defining and leading the test strategy for complex financial services transformation programmes, providing quality assurance across the full delivery lifecycle, and ensuring that solutions are fit for purpose across business, technology, operational and regulatory requirements.

Your key responsibilities

• Define and own the end-to-end test strategy, test operating model, governance and assurance approach for complex technology transformation programmes.
• Lead test delivery across system integration testing, user acceptance testing, regression, non-functional testing, operational acceptance and production readiness.
• Establish test plans, entry and exit criteria, traceability, quality metrics, defect management processes and executive reporting.
• Provide senior oversight across test managers, test leads, business testers, engineering teams, vendors and third-party delivery partners.
• Ensure requirements, solution designs, test coverage and business outcomes remain aligned throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
• Lead risk-based testing decisions and advise programme leadership on quality, release readiness, residual risk and go-live recommendations.
• Drive automation strategy and continuous testing practices, working with engineering and DevSecOps teams to improve speed, repeatability and control.
• Oversee test environment and test data planning, including dependencies, security, privacy and regulatory considerations.
• Communicate quality status and material risks clearly to senior client stakeholders, governance forums and programme leadership.
• Mentor test leaders and practitioners, strengthen testing capability and support the growth of the Platforms practice.

Skills:

• 10+ years of experience in software testing, quality engineering or technology delivery, including significant leadership responsibility.
• Proven experience leading test delivery for large-scale technology transformation in financial services or another complex regulated environment.
• Deep knowledge of the full software delivery lifecycle and modern testing approaches across Agile, Waterfall and hybrid delivery models.
• Experience defining enterprise or programme-level test strategies, governance, quality metrics, defect processes and release-readiness criteria.
• Leadership experience across multidisciplinary and multi-vendor teams, with accountability for test outcomes, plans, risks, dependencies and quality.
• Strong stakeholder management and the ability to present evidence-based quality assessments to senior business and technology leaders.
• Experience with functional, integration, regression, user acceptance and non-functional testing, including performance, resilience and security coordination.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, commercial awareness and people leadership skills.
• A third-level degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Business or a relevant discipline.

Tools and delivery environments

• Jira and Confluence
• Azure DevOps or equivalent delivery tooling
• Test management tooling such as Tricentis qTest, OpenText ALM / Quality Center or Zephyr
• Automation tooling such as Tricentis Tosca, Selenium, Playwright, Cypress or equivalent
• API testing tools such as Postman or similar
• Performance testing tools such as JMeter or LoadRunner

For more info you can contact david@db-recruitment.ie