Quality Engineering Lead

About us 

We’re Dayshape—an award-winning software scale-up with big ambitions and the momentum to match. Trusted by Big Four and many other top professional services firms globally, our AI-powered resource management platform is helping organisations to achieve extraordinary results.   

Our platform stands apart as the only solution that combines advanced AI, real-time project financials, and firm-wide insights to elevate resource management to a strategic function. By driving profitable growth, powering confident decisions, and ensuring satisfied clients and teams—we're helping our customers build strong organisations and careers for the long term. 

Why our customers love Dayshape: 

• We help professional firms optimise margins and increase revenue, unlocking access to more profitable work.   

• We provide complete operational visibility today and the tools to confidently predict tomorrow.   

• We empower firms to become the places where top talent wants to work - and the best clients want to work with.  

Recognised as Scotland’s fastest-growing tech company in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 for three consecutive years and more recently as the Enterprise Digital Tech Business of the Year at the 2024 ScotlandIS awards, we’ve consistently proven our ability to innovate and deliver real impact—and we’re always looking for like-minded people to join us. 

At Dayshape, our purpose is to improve people's working lives, and our culture is an important driving force in helping us to do just that. We're a friendly, inclusive, and ambitious team—driven by our values and a shared commitment to success. If you’re ready to join a fast-growing, high-impact company that’s reimagining resource management, then let’s talk. 

About the Role 

We’re looking for a Quality Engineering Lead who will add new strengths to our Quality Engineering leadership team: someone with proven experience improving how teams work, streamlining quality and release processes, and helping engineering functions scale with confidence. 

This is a people leadership role with a hands-on improvement remit. You’ll line manage a group of Quality Engineers, building their confidence, judgement, stakeholder awareness, technical capability, and ownership of quality outcomes. 

You’ll also work with Engineering, Product, Platform, and Principal Quality Engineers to improve quality and release practices across teams. This includes identifying bottlenecks, simplifying ways of working, automating manual controls, strengthening CI/CD quality signals, improving deployment and release confidence, and helping teams adopt AI responsibly in shared workflows rather than only using it for individual productivity. 

The role adds resilience, pace, and scalability to the Quality Engineering function. You’ll deputise for the Quality Engineering Manager on agreed release activities, lead selected cross-team improvements, and help reduce reliance on individuals, manual processes, and locally different ways of working. 

You won’t be permanently embedded in a product team as additional QE capacity. However, you should be comfortable investigating problems, reviewing technical approaches, proving improvements, and helping teams adopt better ways of working. 

You’ll partner with Principal Quality Engineers, who retain technical leadership for areas such as automation strategy, performance testing, and AI-assisted quality engineering. Depending on the need, you may lead an improvement directly or support a Principal QE to turn technical direction into sustained change. 

Success will be measured through the growth and effectiveness of the people you manage, and through measurable improvements in how the wider team works: faster feedback loops, clearer quality evidence, more repeatable release practices, stronger adoption of shared standards, and responsible AI use that improves team outcomes. 

What You Will Do 

• Line manage up to 6-10 Quality Engineers through regular 1:1s, development conversations, appraisals, onboarding, and performance support 

• Coach QEs to build confidence, judgement, stakeholder awareness, risk-based thinking, and ownership 

• Monitor workload, capacity, wellbeing, and development needs, escalating risks and informing resourcing decisions 

• Maintain consistent quality expectations across product teams while supporting pragmatic, risk-based approaches 

• Lead cross-team improvements that streamline ways of working, increase automation, shorten feedback loops, and make release decisions safer and more repeatable 

• Investigate bottlenecks, review pipelines and quality signals, and prove practical improvements before scaling them 

• Help teams adopt AI responsibly in shared quality engineering workflows, including test design, automation, investigation, defect analysis, documentation, release evidence, and learning loops 

• Create clarity around scalable team processes, ensuring improvements are adopted consistently rather than remaining dependent on one person or one team 

• Support quality reviews, readiness conversations, and risk discussions where additional oversight is needed 

• Deputise for the Quality Engineering Manager on agreed release activities, including readiness reviews, risk assessments, evidence coordination, and follow-up 

• Ensure release risks have clear recommendations, owners, and actions 

• Support learning from hotfixes and incidents through proportionate test reviews, defect analysis, and prevention actions 

• Coordinate with Principal Quality Engineers on strategic initiatives without duplicating their technical ownership 

• Ensure QEs have the clarity, time, support, and development opportunities needed to contribute to cross-team improvements 

About You 

• Established experience directly managing engineers or other technical contributors; this is not a first-time manager role 

• A genuine commitment to people management as your primary focus, rather than an addition to a hands-on technical role 

• Experience coaching and developing people through regular 1:1s, feedback, development planning, and performance conversations 

• Confidence supporting people through ambiguity, change, delivery pressure, and competing priorities 

• Strong judgement and emotional intelligence, including in difficult or sensitive conversations 

• Ability to build trust, give balanced feedback, and help people own their development 

• Confidence identifying and addressing performance, wellbeing, workload, or capability risks early 

• Enough Quality Engineering or software delivery experience to understand and coach QEs effectively 

• A pragmatic approach that balances quality risk, delivery pressure, evidence, and customer impact 

• A calm, clear, and collaborative style when working across Quality Engineering, Engineering, Product, and People Ops 

• Proven experience streamlining team processes through automation, CI/CD improvements, or better build, test, deployment, and release workflows 

• Ability to move from problem discovery to proof of concept, adoption, and sustained improvement 

• Experience using AI to improve team workflows or shared engineering practices, with sound judgement around verification, sensitive information, adoption, and measurable impact 

Bonus Points For 

• Experience managing Quality Engineers in a product engineering or SaaS environment 

• Experience leading both experienced and earlier-career contributors 

• Involvement in hiring and calibration for technical roles 

• Experience making and explaining risk-based recommendations in release or quality governance 

• Experience partnering with Principal or Staff engineers while leaving technical ownership with them 

• Experience improving quality practices across multiple teams through coaching, standards, and alignment 

• Practical experience introducing AI-enabled practices across teams to improve quality engineering workflows, visibility, documentation, investigation, learning, or release confidence 

• Experience creating clarity and sensible trade-offs in a fast-changing scale-up environment 

What you’ll get 

• Starting salary up to £63,000, depending on experience. 

• At least £1,000 per year to spend on professional and personal development 

• 33 days' holiday per year (including bank holidays), increasing by 1 day each year to a maximum of 40 days 

• Paid four-week sabbatical in your fifth anniversary year on top of your holiday entitlement 

• Enhanced family leave policies 

• Private healthcare and rewards through AXA 

• Income protection and death in service cover 

• Matched 5% auto-enrolment workplace pension scheme 

• Access to wellbeing offerings, such as our Employee Assistance Programme and a dedicated counselling service 

• Volunteering time – up to 20 hours a year to participate in volunteer work 

• Regular All Hands meeting for inspiration and over-communication 

• Time out of the working week for team socials each month, with a mix of in-person and virtual options: past events include hiking, family BBQs, board games and at-home cocktail classes! 

• Genuinely nice, smart people to work with, who are excited about growing our company 

Working Details 

This is a full-time role (37.5 hours per week). We typically work from 09:00 - 17:30 from Monday to Friday, though we can be flexible around this, just let us know.  

This role can be remote or hybrid. We’re ideally looking for someone in/around Edinburgh, able to work on a hybrid basis between home and our Haymarket office. As a people leadership role, successful candidates should be willing and able to travel to the Edinburgh office regularly, typically at least once per month, with additional visits during onboarding, team events and key leadership activities.

We don't mandate required office days, but we find that most of the team enjoy working from the office 2-3 days a week to connect with their team and other Dayshapers and to make use of space, and for meetings and collaboration. We are open to considering remote for the right candidate, as long as you are based in the UK.

Join the team! 

Equality of opportunity is more than just a responsibility: we believe it is a huge advantage to welcome a variety of experiences and perspectives into the team. Diversity is a great asset and, as such, we strongly encourage applications from any background. 

This is your opportunity to really influence how we get things done, and how we measure and improve our capability to deliver software with high quality in a scalable way. We are looking for someone who can add to what we already have: bringing fresh experience of streamlining team processes, accelerating improvement, and helping quality practices scale across teams. 

Everyone here is growing personally as the company grows, so if that sounds like something you would like to be part of, we would love to see your application. 

The deadline for applications is Thursday 8th October at 12pm.

*Please note the successful candidate for this role will be subject to background checks and will have an opportunity to declare anything to us beforehand*