Test manager

Test Manager - Service Transformation Lab (Modern Workplace Platform)

Locations: Leeds or Edinburgh (40% in-office)

Contract: 12 months

Inside ir35

Why this role matters

The Modern Workplace Platform powers how 60,000+ colleagues interact with technology every day. The Service Transformation Lab (STL) delivers modern, insight-driven services that are reliable, resilient, and colleague centric. As our Test Manager, you will lead high quality testing across multiple agile feature teams to ensure everything we release is robust, intuitive, and ready for real world use.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys collaboration, clarity, and continuous improvement, and who wants to make a meaningful difference to colleague experience at scale.

What you'll do

• Own the test strategy for several SAFe aligned feature teams, ensuring clear and efficient test processes across sprint and PI cycles.
• Coordinate system, integration, functional, regression and user testing, ensuring test scope aligns to story intent and business outcomes.
• Ensure acceptance criteria and test plans are of high standard - supporting Product Owners and Engineers to define clear, testable stories.

Champion Tooling & Ways of Working

• Use Jira and Jira Align to manage test planning, traceability, and reporting across teams and Program Increments.
• Support teams in optimising how they use ServiceNow-particularly where feature enhancements or platform changes require structured testing or UAT.
• Drive adoption of consistent testing standards across squads within the SAFe delivery model.

Lead & Develop People

• Line-manage and coach Testers embedded within feature teams, ensuring they have the support, clarity and confidence to thrive.
• Foster a psychologically safe, inclusive team environment that values collaboration, learning and knowledge sharing.

Make Quality Visible

Define and maintain meaningful testing metrics, such as:

• test coverage
• pass/fail trends
• defect trends and defect escape rate
• readiness-for-release indicators
• Produce clear and accessible quality reporting to Product Owners, Feature Leads, and Program teams.

Continuous Improvement

• Drive improvements to testing processes, environments, data availability, and release readiness.
• Identify blockers early and work with Engineers, Product Owners and System Test partners to resolve them quickly.
• Improve efficiency by eliminating redundant testing, streamlining handoffs, and increasing the speed and accuracy of feedback cycles.

What you'll bring

• Experience leading test activity across complex, multi team agile environments (SAFe experience highly valued).
• Strong understanding of test planning, system testing, integration testing, regression testing and structured UAT.
• Ability to challenge and support teams to produce clear acceptance criteria and test conditions.
• Excellent people leadership - able to coach, mentor, and build a supportive team culture.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to present complex quality insights to non technical audiences.
• Experience working with Jira, Jira Align, and familiarity with testing processes connected to ServiceNow.

If you believe you have the experience required, please apply with your CV now for instant consideration!

TO APPLY - PLEASE APPLY WITH AN UP-TO-DATE CV

Candidates will ideally show evidence of the above in their CV in order to be considered.

Please be advised if you haven't heard from us within 48 hours then unfortunately your application has not been successful on this occasion, we may however keep your details on file for any suitable future vacancies and contact you accordingly.

Pontoon is an employment consultancy. We put expertise, energy, and enthusiasm into improving everyone's chance of being part of the workplace. We respect and appreciate people of all ethnicities, generations, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, gender identities, and more. We do this by showcasing their talents, skills, and unique experience in an inclusive environment that helps them thrive.

We use generative AI tools to support our candidate screening process. This helps us ensure a fair, consistent, and efficient experience for all applicants. Rest assured, all final decisions are made by our hiring team, and your application will be reviewed with care and attention.