Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
I've spent 14 years in software testing, the last 7 as Lead — managing 14 engineers across Edinburgh and Poland, owning releases, and being the person teams come to when something goes wrong or a high-risk project needs experienced eyes. At Zonal I drove automation coverage to 85% using Selenium across the platform, with Playwright integrated into the CI/CD pipeline — everything feeding into Azure DevOps. After a difficult peak season I led full incident remediation; incidents dropped 85% year-on-year and kept improving. I've been integrating AI tools into my workflow for a while — Claude — for test design, automation and support ticket analysis. It genuinely changes what a team can output. On the delivery side I've covered Scrum Master, Product Owner and Delivery Manager responsibilities alongside the Lead role — sprint ceremonies, release readiness, stakeholder reporting and client demos. 🏆 Key Achievements: Grew automation coverage from 0% to 85%, reducing regression effort significantly Reduced peak-season incidents by 85% year-on-year Led 14-engineer onshore and offshore team Delivered payment integrations across Braintree, Worldpay, FreedomPay, Apple Pay and Google Pay Took a business-critical API from zero to production in three weeks Recovered a high-risk project to production on time — now a flagship Zonal product Built an audit UI tool that transformed support team efficiency Interviewed, hired, onboarded and mentored engineers across QA and development 🎯 Core Competencies: Manual & Automation Testing | API & Performance Testing | Shift-Left Testing | BDD/TDD | Test Strategy & Planning | Agile Delivery | Release Management | Offshore Team Leadership | 4th-Line Production Support | Stakeholder Reporting | Recruitment & Onboarding | GDPR & Data Processing | Security Testing | Tooling Evaluation & Budget Management 🛠 Technical Skills: Automation: Selenium | Cypress | Playwright API Testing: Postman | ReadyAPI | SoapUI Performance: JMeter | K6 CI/CD: Jenkins | Azure DevOps | GitHub Monitoring: Graylog | BrowserStack Payments: Braintree | Worldpay | FreedomPay | Apple Pay | Google Pay Languages: Java | JavaScript | C# | Python AI Tools: Claude | Cursor | GitHub Copilot | ChatGPT Tooling: Jira | Azure DevOps | Git | VMware | VirtualBox 🏅 Certifications: ISTQB Foundation Certificate in Software Testing ISTQB Intermediate Certificate in Software Testing
Led QA strategy and execution across multiple web, API, and backend services Delivered high-impact projects including: Payment integration (Braintree, WorldPay, FreedomPay) Email/SMS platforms with quiet-time logic Audit trail service for user change tracking Increased automation coverage from 0% to 70% on a major product Managed multi-system integration (Pre-Order Resend, Brand Swap) with zero production issues Defined and implemented test strategy across 10+ projects Led Agile ceremonies: sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives Trained and mentored 6 testers (3 onshore, 3 offshore) Built and maintained automation backlogs using Selenium, Cypress, Postman, and JMeter Supported CI/CD with Jenkins, Azure DevOps Pipelines, and GitHub Handled SQL mapping for brand migrations with no customer impact Designed internal support rotas and de-provisioning processes ISTQB Foundation Certified | Scrum | Manual & Automated Testing | QA Leadership
• Responsible for managing the testing effort across three products • Training and onboarding the off-shore delivery team • Writing and planning test improvements within the delivery team • Writing user stories for the product team when required • Setting both short-term and long-term testing objectives for test resource within the department to upskill resource • Ensure testing standards are met within the delivery team • Conducting code reviews for delivered test automation • Writing API & front-end automation tests • Planning and running sprint planning for the team • Running daily stand-ups for the team • Plan and organise the in-hour support rota • Recruiting test resource for my team • Running Zonal recruitment events
Online Banking & Current Account Opening, Applabs, Deployed to Royal Bank of Scotland • Write and execute automated scripts for the online banking platform, using QTP • Write and execute manual scripts • Report the automation progress to the test manager and provide feedback for the test completion report • Analyse the existing system and decide the level of automation • Conduct lesson learned meetings at the end of the release • Train up other testers to execute automated scripts. • Produce evidence via automation for manual tester & stakeholders • Communicating with business/stakeholders to provide evidence on testable requirements. I would also give presentations of automation to stakeholders/other teams. • Run automation scripts to prove scenarios and generate evidence for testers to run manual scripts • Write detailed test scripts based on requirement documentation.