Job Title: Head of QA

Reporting To: Director of Engineering

Location: Primarily remote working with occasional travel to Bournemouth/Bristol once or twice a month

Salary: Competitive

Job Type: Full Time 37.5 hours a week

Our Purpose

Nourish Care provides a digital solution to the health and social care sector which improves the process of recording, analysing, and sharing of information. We seek to enhance and simplify care in equal measures; To harness the power of care management software to improve the lives of people who need care and those who provide it.

We are in the midst of one of the most exciting times in our history and while we are the current market leader in the sector, we will not be complacent. We are dedicated to our purpose of a better life for everyone. We continue to revolutionise the care sector and our incredible employees are what make this possible.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Head of Quality Assurance to define, lead, and evolve quality across the Nourish engineering organisation.

This is a senior, primarily strategic leadership role with a hands-on element, responsible for taking QA to the next level as we scale our platform, teams, and technical ambition. You will own the quality strategy across multiple squads, while enabling teams to deliver high-quality software at speed through strong practices, automation, and shared accountability.

QA at Nourish is embedded within delivery squads, and this will continue. In parallel, you will lead a small central capability focused on advancing our automation strategy and quality tooling. The Head of QA will not be embedded in a single squad, but will operate across the organisation, working closely with Engineering, Product, and Platform leadership.

This role has an approximate 80/20 split between leadership and execution, combining strategic ownership with enough hands-on involvement to remain close to the work and credible with teams. 

What You’ll Be Accountable For

Quality Strategy & Transformation

• Defining and owning the overall QA and quality strategy for Nourish

• Transforming QA practices to support a growing, high-performing engineering organisation

• Establishing a clear vision for quality that scales with the platform and teams

• Evolving our approach to automation, test coverage, and quality metrics

• Ensuring quality is built in from discovery through to production, not inspected in later

Delivery & Quality Enablement

• Championing a shared ownership model where quality is everyone’s responsibility and QA enables teams to succeed

• Setting standards and expectations for testing approaches across squads

• Driving continuous improvement in test automation, API testing, frontend testing, and non-functional testing

• Ensuring performance and reliability testing are consistently addressed

• Supporting security testing through shared ownership and effective use of tooling

• Providing pragmatic leadership under delivery pressure, balancing speed with risk

 Automation & Tooling

• Leading the organisation’s automation strategy across backend, API, and frontend systems

• Line managing two automation engineers focused on advancing automation outside of squad boundaries

• Ensuring quality tooling integrates effectively with CI/CD pipelines

• Promoting automation as a core enabler of fast, safe delivery

 People Leadership

•  Line managing four direct reports:

  • Two QA Leads (who in turn manage QA engineers embedded in squads)

  • Two Automation Engineers

• Coaching and developing QA leaders and engineers, building capability and confidence

• Creating clear career paths, expectations, and development plans within QA

• Fostering a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing quality culture

 Collaboration & Stakeholder Management 

 Working closely with:

• Engineering leadership

• Product Management

• Platform / DevOps teams

• Acting as a senior quality voice in delivery and planning discussions

• Reporting on quality, risk, and progress to the Director of Engineering and senior leadership

• Influencing without relying on hierarchy, enabling teams rather than gatekeeping delivery

 Our Development Culture

• Product-focused agile environment using Scrum

• Strong emphasis on collaboration, pair programming, and code reviews

• Preference for clean, maintainable solutions over over-engineering

• Engineers are involved in sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives

• Continuous learning is actively supported through books, courses, certifications, and other resources

• Shared responsibility for infrastructure, DevOps, and CI/CD depending on experience

 Technology Context

• Backend: Ruby,  PHP (Symfony), MySQL, Postgres

• Frontend: Vue.js

• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Semaphore

Our systems handle thousands of requests per minute and manage databases with hundreds of millions of records. We design and architect with scalability-first principles, use caching extensively, and integrate with third-party services 

What We’re Looking For

 Essential

• Proven experience leading QA or quality engineering at a senior level

• Strong background in modern QA practices within agile, cross-functional teams

• Deep understanding of test automation strategies across backend, API, and frontend systems

• Experience enabling teams to own quality rather than acting as a delivery gate

• Strong people leadership skills, including managing managers

• Ability to operate strategically while remaining close enough to execution to be effective

• Calm, pragmatic decision-making under delivery pressure

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

 Desirable

• Experience in regulated or complex domains (e.g. healthcare)

• Experience scaling QA practices in growing engineering organisations

• Exposure to performance, reliability, and security testing strategies at scale

Experience working with cloud-native, high-throughput systems

Nourish Benefits:

• 25 days basic annual leave, plus Bank Holidays

• In addition, we offer incremental leave benefit of 1 extra day for each completed year of service, up to a maximum of 5 additional days. This means long standing employees can enjoy up to 30 days of annual leave per year, plus bank holidays.

• Extra paid day off for your birthday

• Paid days off for volunteering opportunities

• Private Medical Insurance

• Pension

• Referral Bonus

• Health and Wellbeing platform including access to 24/7 GP & 24/7 EAP

• Counselling and support

• Variable impact workouts.

• Wellbeing videos including prompts for healthy behaviours

• Wellbeing, care and compassion leave policies

• Cycle to Work Scheme

• Career Development opportunities and regular reviews

• Recognition and Rewards

• Social Events throughout the year

All positions at Nourish are subject to a satisfactory Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check, references and receipt of the appropriate Right to Work documents.

Nourish is proud to be an equal opportunities employer and we actively seek and embrace differences in thinking, experience, ethnicity, age, gender, faith, personalities and styles.

The different skills, experiences and backgrounds our employees bring to their roles creates a diverse and makes Nourish a special place to work