Head of Quality Engineering Jobs in South Africa

This is a senior technical leadership role for a quality engineering leader who still enjoys hands-on work. About 60% of the role is hands-on technical work, including framework code, performance engineering and reviews, with the rest spent setting standards and leading quality across multiple teams in a hybrid Cape Town role.

About the company and the work

The role is advertised through Datafin, a South African recruitment company, for a client in the online gambling sector. The head of quality engineering owns test automation strategy and the automation pyramid across Java, .NET, React and Flutter stacks, and owns performance, security and accessibility testing across player-facing services and apps.

It is a permanent, senior-level, hybrid position. The leader acts as the senior technical escalation point for quality risk and for go or no-go decisions on releases.

Role details and duties

• Own the test automation strategy and automation pyramid across Java, .NET, React and Flutter stacks.
• Design, build and maintain shared automation frameworks, libraries and test data tooling.
• Define what counts as done for automated coverage and enforce it through pull request reviews.
• Drive flaky-test elimination, faster test execution and reliable pipelines.
• Own performance, load, stress, soak and resilience testing across player-facing services and apps.
• Set performance baselines and service level objectives, add performance checks to continuous integration, and diagnose performance problems.
• Own security testing, including static and dynamic application security testing and dependency scanning, and accessibility testing.
• Set and publish quality engineering standards and coverage expectations, and review squad delivery against them.
• Report quality metrics, including escaped defects, change failure rate, coverage and mean time to recovery contribution.
• Lead root-cause analysis of released defects and production incidents.
• Upskill engineers in test design, automation and performance through pairing and reviews.
• Give functional leadership and technical direction to quality engineers in squads, and own the quality tooling estate.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted test generation, maintenance and defect analysis.

Requirements

Only the requirements stated in the original listing are summarised here:

• A bachelor’s degree at NQF 7 or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a similar field.
• At least one recognised professional certification in test or performance engineering, for example ISTQB.
• Ten or more years in software engineering or quality engineering, including at least 5 years of hands-on building.
• At least 3 years leading quality engineering technically across multiple teams, in a head, lead, principal or similar role.
• Professional software development experience in at least one of Java, C#/.NET or TypeScript.
• Experience embedding quality into continuous delivery, including quality gates and test parallelisation.
• Mobile test automation experience, including Flutter, native iOS and Android, or React Native, is strongly preferred.
• A cloud certification at associate level or above, for example AWS Certified Developer or Solutions Architect, is preferred.
• Certification in CI/CD, container or infrastructure platforms, such as Kubernetes, GitHub Actions or Terraform, is preferred.
• Experience in a regulated, high-availability consumer environment, such as online gaming, fintech or e-commerce, is preferred.

Where to find and apply safely

Apply only through the original CareerJunction listing, using the Apply button on this page. Do not pay any fee to apply, and be cautious of anyone who asks for money or personal documents outside the official route.

Practical tips

• Show frameworks you built yourself, not only frameworks you used, and explain the quality outcomes they delivered.
• Give performance engineering examples, including baselines, objectives and problems you diagnosed.
• Be ready to explain how you set standards across teams and handled a difficult release decision.
• Highlight mobile automation, cloud or CI/CD certifications where you hold them.

How the process works

Read the full original listing, then apply through the original link with a CV that sets out your quality engineering leadership, hands-on building experience and technical depth across the stacks listed. If you are shortlisted, the recruiter or employer will contact you through the official application channel.

Important information

This page is informational only and does not guarantee a job, an interview or any salary. The original listing does not disclose a salary, so none is shown here. Confirm the final duties, hybrid working pattern and terms in the original advert before you apply.

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