QA & Test Engineer Manager

The PureGym Way

The PureGym Group is a global gym business with a community of more than 700 gyms and over 2 million members. At PureGym, everything we do comes back to one simple idea: helping you feel good.

We're proud of our people and have a strong focus on internal progression. Championing diversity, we are committed to providing an excellent employee experience and workplace culture. As such, we are a Disability Confident Committed employer, and offer interviews to candidates who meet the essential criteria for a role, and opt-in to the scheme on their application form.

Our gyms are friendly, supportive, and judgement-free spaces where everybody can come in, work out and leave Feeling PureGym Good. We are proud to be certified by Top Employers Institute. See our careers page for full benefits.

We offer

• Free nationwide gym membership for you + 1
• Hybrid working
• A truly flexible working culture
• Personal private healthcare, including digital GP
• Life insurance x4
• Company pension contribution
• 25 days annual leave, plus 1 personal day
• Option to purchase additional holiday (up to 5 days)
• Great learning & development resources
• Enhanced maternity pay, paternity and adoption leave

 

The Role

Location: Remote

Type: Full Time
Contract type: Permanent

Application: Closing date 5th June

 

We are looking for a QA & Test Engineer Manager to lead PureGym’s QA and Test Engineering function, ensuring quality is built into everything we ship and our test automation capability keeps pace with the speed of a high-frequency agile delivery team. This is a technical leadership role: you will grow and manage a team of Lead QAs who matrix into our delivery squads, own the automation frameworks and AI-driven testing approaches that multiply the team’s capacity, and hold the bar on quality standards and NFR performance across the function.

PureGym’s digital platforms power millions of member interactions and are evolving at pace. As QA and Test Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of QA professionals, directly managing three Lead QAs organised by technology platform: website, payments, and mobile app. Each lead operates with varying team sizes reflecting the specialist nature of their platform, and the structure is designed to flex as our technology and squad model evolves. Your accountability spans both the people and the craft: growing and developing your team, and ensuring the technical quality infrastructure they rely on is robust, modern, and moving forward.

This is a hands-on technical role as much as a people leadership one. The ratio of engineers to QA in our squads means every QA practitioner must be leveraged by strong automation, and the pace of AI advancement means there are real opportunities to go further: agentic test runs, AI-driven exploratory testing, automated defect triage, and intelligent test coverage analysis. You will lead from the front on that agenda.

You will work closely with the Head of Software Engineering, Software Engineering Managers, and the Principal Software Engineer to ensure quality is woven into the engineering culture and not treated as a handover or gate at the end. You will partner with the Head of Software Delivery on delivery cadence, release readiness, and the quality signals that give the function confidence to ship.

You will also be the quality voice outward to the business. Finance and payment partners have a direct interest in what has been tested across our payment processing flows and what risk is being accepted. Commercial and market teams need confidence, in terms they can act on, that conversion-critical flows, product mix, and localisation have been covered before a new market goes live. Building those relationships, understanding their expectations, and ensuring they have the quality visibility they need to make confident decisions is a meaningful part of this role, not a secondary one.

Roughly, you can expect your time to split across five areas, though the balance will flex with the quarter:

• ~25% people leadership: 1:1s with Lead QAs, performance management, development planning, and hiring
• ~30% technical contribution and tooling: building and maintaining test automation frameworks, AI-driven test tooling, and the CI/CD test integration that keeps quality visible throughout the delivery pipeline
• ~20% quality standards and strategy: owning and evolving the function’s quality standards, NFR coverage, and test strategy across the full stack
• ~15% squad and delivery partnership: embedding in the upstream delivery process, working with engineers and delivery teams on quality approach, risk, and release readiness
• ~10% reporting and engineering hygiene: quality metrics, DORA signals, defect trends, and compliance

 

The Team

The QA and Test Engineering team is part of PureGym’s Software Engineering function, with a clear purpose: ensuring the quality, reliability, and correctness of the web and app products that acquire and retain members at every PureGym. We’re hyper-focused on five key business outcomes: converting visitors to members, retaining and winning back subscribers, expanding rapidly into new markets, driving acquisition traffic, and supporting PureGym’s low-cost, self-service model.

The team sits alongside Software Engineering and Software Delivery, with QA professionals matrixed into our five delivery squads. The team is organised by technology platform rather than by squad: a Lead QA covers the website platform across Web Teams 1 and 2 and the Commercial squad, a specialist Lead QA owns the payments subsystem, and a Lead QA covers the mobile app. Each lead has a small number of practitioners, and the structure may flex as the platform evolves. The team operates in a high-engineering-velocity environment, which means automation is required as the foundation of how we maintain quality at pace. We’re AI-first and expect this team to be at the forefront of what agentic testing, AI-assisted exploratory testing, and intelligent test automation make possible.

You will be responsible for:

• Providing line management for Lead QAs, including regular 1:1s, performance conversations, development planning, and pastoral support, and supporting those Lead QAs in managing and developing the QA practitioners in their teams
• Owning the growth and progression of your team through the growth framework, setting clear development goals, tracking progress, and supporting promotion cases
• Building, maintaining, and continuously improving the test automation frameworks that underpin quality across the full technical stack: web, native mobile, APIs, and backend services; this includes the underlying infrastructure that makes automation reliable at scale: harness services that provision test accounts and seed test data consistently, environment parity across dev, staging, and production-equivalent environments, and automation that runs dependably across our UK and international markets without manual intervention or fragile setup
• Leading the function’s adoption of AI-driven testing: harnessing agentic AI to run exploratory test scenarios, interrogate and reason about code, identify regression risk, and generate and maintain test cases at scale; staying ahead of what is possible and translating that into practical capability for the team
• Owning the quality standards and test strategy for the function, ensuring they are current, applied consistently across all squads, and evolving as the technology and delivery approach changes, including leading the QA Chapter as the cross-functional community of practice for quality standards, test automation, and knowledge sharing across the function
• Ensuring quality is embedded in CI/CD pipelines, with automated test runs, coverage signals, and quality gates visible to engineers throughout the delivery process rather than at the end of it
• Partnering with the Head of Software Engineering and Principal Software Engineer on NFR performance, particularly around uptime, API performance, accessibility, and the quality signals that feed into DORA metrics
• Working closely with Software Engineering Managers and Delivery Managers to ensure squads are well supported by QA, that quality risks are surfaced early, and that release readiness conversations are grounded in real data
• Partnering with engineering and delivery leadership to evolve how quality works across the full SDLC: shifting QA from a production line step into a shared discipline where quality thinking starts at requirements, acceptance criteria and edge cases are defined before code is written, and functional test automation is co-owned between engineers and QA rather than handed over at the end; harnessing agentic AI to generate test boilerplate against requirements so that automation coverage grows alongside feature development, with QA reviewing and refining rather than starting from scratch; and building a quality culture that is resilient enough that delivery does not depend on a single QA’s availability to keep flowing
• Championing AI-accelerated QA across the function: coaching Lead QAs to use AI tooling effectively, setting the direction for how the team’s AI capability evolves, and contributing to the function’s broader productivity ambition
• Engaging with non-engineering business stakeholders (including Finance, payment partners, and commercial and market teams) to understand and agree coverage expectations for business-critical areas; ensuring those stakeholders have clear, timely visibility of test coverage and quality posture ahead of significant releases, market launches, and technology transformations, in language that enables confident business decisions rather than just engineering sign-off
• Contributing to hiring, onboarding, and building a pipeline of QA talent that will sustain the function as it grows

 

The Person

You are a QA leader who has never left the craft behind. You have the technical range to build and own test automation frameworks across a full-stack digital environment, and the people instincts to develop Lead QAs who are growing into technical leaders in their own right. You have worked at a senior level in QA before, and you understand that quality at this scale is won through automation, engineering culture, and the right kind of upstream investment, not through manual testing effort alone.

You are genuinely excited by what AI makes possible in quality engineering. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical, what-can-I-build-with-this-today way. You have already started exploring how agentic AI can improve outcomes at pace. You see this as the most important shift in QA practice in a decade, and you want to lead it.

You are comfortable holding both the technical and the leadership conversation in the same day. You can work with a Lead QA on their development plan in the morning and spend the afternoon building the next iteration of your automation framework. You do not see these as competing demands: they are the job, and you are energised by both.

You understand what it means to be lean. You do not expand the team’s reach by adding headcount: you expand it by building smarter automation, adopting AI tooling aggressively, and developing your people to work at a higher level. You hold the bar on quality standards without using manual testing as a crutch, and you make the real quality picture visible to the function rather than managing it quietly in the background.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has a track record at Lead QA or QA Manager level, with experience leading and developing QA professionals in a line management capacity
• Is a strong test automation practitioner: can build and maintain automation frameworks for web, mobile, and API layers, and has strong opinions about what good looks like
• Has hands-on testing experience across web, native mobile (iOS and Android), and API layers, including RESTful JSON and GraphQL services; understands how integration and end-to-end test automation suites sit alongside unit tests at each surface
• Has genuine hands-on experience with AI-assisted testing or is actively exploring agentic approaches to test generation, exploratory testing, and defect analysis
• Is technically credible across the full software delivery lifecycle and can engage meaningfully with engineers, architects, and delivery managers on quality strategy and risk
• Is a confident people leader: able to develop Lead QAs through direct management and coaching, and support those Lead QAs in managing and developing their own teams
• Understands the relationship between quality, CI/CD, and engineering velocity: knows how to embed quality signals throughout the pipeline rather than treating testing as a phase
• Takes NFR standards seriously: understands the quality dimension of uptime, API performance, accessibility, and security, and contributes to keeping these visible and acted on across the function
• Is outcome-focused: cares about shipping software that works reliably and meets member and business needs, not about the volume of tests written
• Builds trusted relationships with non-engineering business stakeholders (Finance, payment partners, and commercial and market teams), translating quality posture, coverage decisions, and residual risk into language that enables confident business decisions; understands that these stakeholders have a legitimate interest in quality outcomes, particularly around payment processing, market launches, and conversion-critical flows, and engages with them proactively rather than reactively

 

Desirable

• Experience testing across web, native mobile (iOS and Android), and backend API layers including RESTful JSON and GraphQL services
• Familiarity with .NET, Azure, or event-driven microservice architectures
• Experience with accessibility testing (WCAG 2.1 AA), and performance and load testing
• Experience in a direct-to-consumer digital business (app, website, or e-commerce)
• Hands-on experience with agentic AI testing frameworks or tools
• Experience delivering and supporting digital products across multiple markets or geographies

 

PureGym is proud to be an equal opportunities employer. Our company mantra is ‘Everybody Welcome’ and we are dedicated to promoting a diverse and inclusive place to work. From a hiring standpoint, we welcome applicants from all backgrounds and are committed to ensuring that our PureGym colleagues reflect the diversity of the nation as well as our millions of gym members we serve. 

Please note: Qualifications and Skills represent the essential criteria for the role, which need to be met to be offered an interview under the Disability Confident Scheme. Volume of eligible applications may impact everyone being able to be offered an interview.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and the advert may be withdrawn at any time. Early application is encouraged.