QA Lead

Adherent is the leading provider of market access and product compliance SaaS solutions and is recognized as the leading end-to-end global product compliance solution provider across the technology, consumer goods and retail, industrial goods and life sciences sectors. The company’s market leading SaaS platform, C2P, enables uninterrupted market access for enterprises selling products globally by monitoring and managing key product requirements, regulations and standards in their chosen markets. The C2P platform provides the world’s most comprehensive database of legislative information, insights and actions, linked to product workflows, to help clients bring products to markets faster with lower risk and ensure ongoing compliance.

The company serves over 220+ global enterprise customers including: GE, Google, Nike, Amazon, Ikea, Bose, Tesla, Vaillant, Unisys, Samsung and Fujitsu.

Our Values:

All employees should continually promote legacy of Company Culture through demonstrating its values – 1. Trust 2. Respect 3. Winning Together 4. Innovation

Compliance & Risks is an Equal Opportunities Employer.

Purpose:

We are hiring a QA Lead who starts hands-on to run our QA team day to day. You will be embedded in one pod as a Quality Engineer, the same as the rest of the team, and you will also lead that team: three Quality Engineers report to you. You are the connection between the Engineering Manager and the QA team. The Engineering Manager sets quality strategy and direction. You turn it into day-to-day practice, feed the team’s reality back up, and carry the operational load of goal setting, performance reviews, coaching, and reviewing your team’s work. You stay hands-on and technical throughout. Most of your quality leverage is upstream. Our pods spec features in depth and hand them to coding agents that build the feature and its tests together. Inside your pod you are the advocate, not the executor: the voice asking the awkward questions, pushing the failure modes nobody thought of, and making sure the spec and our shared testing skills are good enough that the agent produces the right tests, at the right level, catching the right things. Expect to be hands-on early while that foundation is still thin. Expect that to reduce deliberately over time as the skills sharpen and the pod’s own quality thinking matures.

Key Responsibilities:

QA Team Leadership: Lead the three Quality Engineers who report to you. Set their goals, run their performance reviews, coach them day to day, and review their work. You are the senior voice they turn to on what good looks like and what to do next, and the first escalation point when they are stuck.
Spec-Time Advocacy: Be in the room while the pod specs a feature, before any code exists. Ask the awkward questions, push the edge cases and failure modes nobody has thought of, and hold the line that acceptance criteria are testable and traceable. A vague spec produces vague tests, so this is where most of your quality leverage lives.
Agentic Test Quality: Our coding agents write most of our tests. Curate what they are told: the shared testing skills, patterns, and guardrails that decide what gets tested, at what level, and how. Verify the output is load bearing using mutation testing, rather than assuming a green suite means a covered feature.
Coaching & Culture: Focus on coaching over absorbing workload. Review the tests that arrive with a pull request, whether a developer or an agent wrote them, asking probing questions to ensure they prove meaningful outcomes. You raise the developers’ ceiling by mentoring them on test efficacy.
Fold Back and Compound: A lesson that only lands in one spec is a lesson we pay for twice. When something is missed, get the reasoning back into the shared skills, gates and patterns so the next feature starts better than the last. This is what makes the role shrink rather than grow: every fold-back reduces how much intervention the next feature needs from you.
Hands-on When It Counts: Coach rather than cover. You still open the editor for exploratory testing, a missing test, a gnarly end-to-end flow, or awkward test data, but that is the exception rather than how you spend your week. Expect this to be heavier in your first months and lighter as the skills mature. That reduction is the point.
Holistic Quality: Help the team integrate performance, security, and accessibility into our quality practices. You contribute to ensuring accessibility is asserted against our live shared config.

Requirements:

5+ years of software testing experience in a commercial environment with 3+ years acting as a technical lead in QA teams.
B.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering or equivalent lifetime experience.
Formal leadership experience, including performance management of a team.
Experience in architectural and pipeline design to prevent systemic failures.
Hands-on experience building with agentic tools and workflows, focusing on prompt engineering and LLM-based testing frameworks.
Proficiency in performance, security, and accessibility testing.
Experience working with modern CI/CD platforms and DevOps best practices.
Proficiency in JIRA or similar project management tools.
Expertise with automation tools like Cypress, Stryker, Allure, PactumJS, etc.

The Perks:

A competitive salary, company bonus, health insurance, pension, wellbeing programme
An exciting and dynamic role with career development opportunities and progression
The opportunity to work with talented and diverse team in an inclusive work environment
A learning culture where continued learning & development is supported and encouraged
Remote working options and a flexible environment that promotes wellness and work life balance

Company Highlights:

20-30% YoY revenue growth since 2017
Established global offices
Top private equity sponsorship from Luminate Capital Partners
70,000+ regulations and standards on the platform
A marketing leading retention rate over 95%

Apply Now

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