Job Description

Head of Technical Testing
Permanent
Location: Hybrid (Corby or London)
RS Group is seeking a Head of Technical Testing to lead and expand our Pre-Production Testing capabilities across Digital and Engineering functions. This role is accountable for the strategic direction, execution, and continuous improvement of the Technical Test Team, including application security and infrastructure testing.
You will lead a team of 6 internal and external members, with significant growth anticipated as the function expands. Building the future structure, people plan, and capabilities will be a core responsibility.
The key objective of this role is to ensure high-quality test outcomes with zero production impacts, leveraging automation, modern tooling, and efficiency improvements to support seamless transitions into testing and onward deployment.
What you'll be doing:
Strategic Leadership & Team Management

• Build, own, and drive global strategies for:

• Test Automation
• Performance Testing
• Application Security Testing
• Infrastructure Testing
• Recruit, develop, and manage a high-performing team to deliver on these strategies
• Build team structure, KPI frameworks, and growth plans aligned with future investment
• Manage team backlog and prioritize work based on business impact

Technical & Operational Excellence

• Assess new technologies and embed innovative approaches, including AI, where appropriate
• Develop and improve test frameworks to support automated functional testing
• Oversee vendor engagement and management
• Collaborate with stakeholders to enhance visibility, quality, and consistency across teams
• Support the Global Test Director in building and managing Test Environment capabilities
• Coach projects and programs to define and articulate testing requirements

Performance & Reporting

• Define KPIs for each technical test pillar and report monthly to the Global Test Director
• Ensure test environments are fit-for-purpose, providing consultancy and recommendations for improvement.

About You
You are a technically strong and strategic leader with a proven ability to drive testing excellence across complex IT environments. You have a hands-on understanding of modern testing practices, automation, performance, security, and infrastructure testing, and can translate technical concepts into business outcomes. You thrive in collaborative environments, are skilled at building high-performing teams, and are motivated to shape the future testing strategy at a global scale.
What you'll bring:

• Strong IT experience with team leadership and management skills
• Hands-on experience with a variety of testing tools and techniques:

• UI testing: Webdriver.io, Selenium, Browserstack
• API testing: Rest Assured, Postman
• Contract testing: PACT
• Unit testing: JUnit, Jest
• CI/CD pipelines: GitLab, Jenkins
• Test/project management: JIRA, TestRail
• Experience in performance testing and monitoring: Core Web Vitals, TTFB, SpeedCurve, Lighthouse, WebPageTest
• Hands-on with APM and monitoring tools (Datadog, Grafana)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools and deployment automation
• Understanding of business impact of performance, SEO, and user experience
• Knowledge of security and infrastructure testing practices and tools

Skills & Competencies

• Strong collaboration, teamwork, and stakeholder management skills
• Ability to lead change using positive, collaborative approaches
• Excellent written, verbal, and presentation communication skills
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts into business outcomes
• Deep understanding of IT industry trends, emerging technologies, standards, solution architecture, and vendor landscape

The extras you'll get
?At RS, as well as the usual employee benefits you'd expect from an FTSE listed company, including annual performance bonus, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, and private healthcare, in the UK&I, we've just introduced a number of new Family Friendly Policies including:?

• Help people to take control of ongoing Health conditions such as diabetes or asthma with 500 a year available for monitoring and consultation?
• Support for Neurodiverse colleagues and families with neurodiverse members with needs assessment, diagnosis, and post-diagnostic support for autism spectrum, ADHD, and Tourette's syndrome?
• Support for Women at different life stages from streamlined fertility support to diagnosis and monitoring of both endometriosis and menopause?
• Helping our LGBTQ+ community through enhanced coverage for trans colleagues, including voice coaching, facial surgery and gender confirmation surgery?
• Additions to Fertility coverage including IVF for lesbian couples and information/support around surrogacy and adoption for all.

We are RS
At RS we've been solving engineering problems for over 80 years: big ones, small ones, easy and difficult ones. We turn the 'what ifs' into the 'why nots', the impossible into the possible. ?
Our purpose? Making amazing happen for a better world. ?
We offer service and product solutions. We send out a parcel every 2 seconds, to over 130 countries. We provide over 700,000 in-stock and over 3 million unstocked products to more than 1.2 million customers. ?
We want people like you, as you are curious about things, you like doing things differently and also in a human way with empathy. Because that's exactly how we partner with people - our customers, suppliers, colleagues and communities - to solve problems. ?
We'll also invest in your development and wellbeing - because building a more diverse and inclusive culture, being ethical, responsible and committed to our Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) action plan is at the heart of everything we do. ?
Come and join us and we'll help you to think big, do more and unleash your brilliance, so you do amazing things too.?
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Skills Required