Quality Assurance Engineering Lead

**Ko wai mātou - About us**

Kia ora. We’re Foodies. You know New World, PAK’nSAVE and Four Square right? That’s us

With 300+ stores and over 24,000 Foodies across Te Ika-a-Maui, our North Island Co-op has the privilege of helping New Zealanders get more out of life. Locally owned, we reflect the communities we serve, and we celebrate our people - our taonga, every day for being uniquely them.

Our Support Centre is 1,000+ people strong, which includes 300+ IT employees, who all play a vital role in ensuring the cogs of our Co-op stay turning and our systems stay ‘byte’-sized and ‘bug’-free.”.

**Te Tūranga - About the role**

As our Quality Assurance Engineering Lead, you’ll be the driving force behind how Foodies delivers reliable, scalable, and high-performing technology across some of the most critical platforms in FMCG. You’ll shape and champion the quality engineering strategy across multiple delivery streams—balancing hands-on technical leadership with people leadership, including coaching, capability uplift, and driving modern QA engineering practices. From eCommerce and Mobile to APIs, Data, SAP and Supply Chain technology, you’ll work at the intersection of customer experience, operational efficiency, and engineering excellence.

You’ll be the quality authority for your squads, enabling teams to build better, faster, and smarter software products. This means owning automation frameworks, embedding shift-left practices, strengthening non-functional testing approaches, and guiding engineers to adopt the tools, techniques, and mindsets needed to deliver high-quality software at pace. Above all, you’ll help cultivate a culture where quality is owned by everyone—and where your team of QA Engineers are empowered, supported, and continuously growing.

In this role, you will**:

- **Define and lead quality engineering strategy** across products, platforms, and delivery squads, ensuring modern, scalable, and fit-for-purpose QA practices.
- **Drive automation excellence**—advancing frameworks, pipelines, test coverage, and shift-left approaches to accelerate high-quality releases.
- **Embed robust non-functional testing** (performance, reliability, security, accessibility) into delivery cycles and enforce high testing hygiene standards.
- **Lead, coach, and grow a high-performing QA capability**, building quality engineering and testing confidence, technical depth, and cross-squad consistency.
- **Strengthen quality governance and continuous improvement**, owning quality gates, metrics, test environments and data, and ongoing optimisation of frameworks and processes.

Ngā painga - What we offer**

We’re committed to providing awesome experiences for our people, including offering a range of benefits:

- Free carparking - we’ve got over 1,000 carparks including 36 free EV plugs
- Southern cross health insurance
- Onsite café with subsidised meals and mini mart
- 5% discount at our retail stores (Pak’NSave, New World and Four Square)
- Flexible working options, a day off on your birthday, long service leave
- Inhouse learning and development programmes and courses, flu vaccinations, and social network groups (we call them Tribes).

He kōrero mōu - About you**

You’re a seasoned Quality Assurance professional with a strong quality engineering foundation and at least eight years of hands-on QA experience, including time spent leading teams or delivery streams. You bring a strong technical toolkit across automation, API and integration testing, data testing, non-functional testing, CI/CD, and modern cloud and containerised environments. You’re as comfortable designing robust automation frameworks as you are guiding teams through complex releases, shaping quality strategy, or translating risks into meaningful insights for non-technical stakeholders.

Your leadership style is grounded in clarity, coaching, and empowerment. You are passionate about uplifting capability, building high-performing QA teams, and embedding a culture where quality is shared, engineered, and continually improved. You thrive in Agile environments, enjoy solving complex engineering problems, and stay curious about the tools, technologies, and practices that enable better, faster, and more scalable delivery.

Above all, you bring a growth mindset, a love for technology, and a genuine drive to help people grow and teams succeed.

You’ll bring**:

- **Strong QA fundamentals** with a relevant tertiary qualification, excellent communication skills, and 8+ years in QA/QE—including leadership across teams, delivery squads, or platforms.
- **A people-first leadership mindset**, including the ability to coach, mentor, motivate, manage workload, uplift engineering capability, and foster a collaborative, high-trust team culture.
- **Strong delivery leadership**, with expertise in Agile, test management tools (e.g., HP ALM, qTest, Xray, Zephyr, TestRail), defect lifecycles, risk communication, and negotiating acceptance outcomes with business stakeho