Director of Quality & Release Engineering, Kaluza
£150-180k
+ Discretionary Bonus Scheme
More information about location
3 days a week in office
Intelligent software platform powering the future of energy
Posted today
Intelligent software platform powering the future of energy
501-1000 employees
Posted today
£150-180k
+ Discretionary Bonus Scheme
More information about location
3 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To help decarbonise the world.
Role
Who you are
- Proven track record leading a QA or quality engineering function of significant scale — including embedded domain leads and direct management of practitioners
- Has directly managed engineers building tooling or automation infrastructure — not just managed QA practitioners executing test plans
- Has delivered a meaningful QA transformation: AI adoption, automation maturity uplift, defect governance overhaul, or similar
- Has worked in a multi-client or multi-product platform environment, managing quality outcomes across concurrent delivery streams
- Has owned release governance in a complex, multi-stream delivery context — including go/no-go accountability
- Exposure to energy, utilities, billing, or similarly regulated complex domains is a plus — not essential
- Strong grounding in test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration — sufficient to credibly lead engineers building these things
- Working knowledge of LLMs and AI tooling in a QA context: test generation, defect triage, coverage analysis, synthetic test data
- Understands test data management principles and the challenges of environment data integrity at scale
- Able to evaluate build vs. buy for tooling; assess AI testing platforms with appropriate scepticism
- Comfortable setting strategy and being accountable for outcomes — not just owning process
- Able to operate at programme level with senior engineering and product stakeholders
- Experienced in leading distributed, multi-timezone quality functions
- Strong communicator — translates quality metrics into business outcomes; can make the case for investment in tooling and governance
- Demonstrated experience leading practice transformation in an engineering context
- Able to bring people with them through transitions that challenge established ways of working
- Comfortable with ambiguity; can hold direction steady while the detail is still being worked out
- Familiar with observability, production monitoring, and shift-right quality practices
- We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they tick every box. But if you're excited about joining us and think you have some of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure, we'd still love to hear from you
What the job involves
- Team: Quality & Release
- Level: Director
- The quality engineering function is shifting from manual oversight and process governance toward an AI-assisted product development lifecycle where QA leads its own domain test strategy and bespoke tooling drives automation maturity
- This role will drive this shift in our organization and ways of working
- You will own quality and release governance at programme level, directly manage an engineering team building AI-assisted automation and test data capability, and set the standard that QA leads across delivery streams work to
- You will be as comfortable driving change as you are accountable for outcomes
- Responsibilities will include:
- Strategic Quality Leadership
- Own and evolve the quality strategy across delivery streams, aligned to programme objectives and client SLAs
- Define and maintain release governance frameworks — release readiness criteria, risk acceptance, and sign-off authorities
- Set quality standards and coverage expectations; ensure QA leads translate these into domain-level test strategies
- Drive defect governance at programme level — internal and client-facing SLA compliance
- Represent quality and risk in senior leadership, architecture, and product forums
- AI-Driven Tooling & Automation
- Directly manage a team of engineers building and maintaining bespoke automation tooling, leveraging AI and LLM capabilities
- Own the test data management strategy — including AI-assisted synthetic data generation and environment data integrity
- Evaluate and select off-the-shelf AI testing tools; define governance frameworks for their use and validation
- Ensure governance gates are maintained as AI participation in the PDLC grows — accountable humans must remain in the loop for risk acceptance and production judgement
- Establish tooling standards that QA leads can adopt across domains without creating dependency on a central bottleneck
- QA Function Leadership & Operating Model
- Lead, develop, and performance-manage QA leads embedded across domains; define the operating model and career framework for the function
- Own the accountability split clearly: QA leads own test strategy and tooling choices for their domain; this role owns the standard they work to
- Drive consistency across streams without becoming a handoff point — enable QA leads to move fast within well-defined guardrails
- Build a quality engineering culture — not a bug-finding one
- Change Management & Adoption
- Lead the transformation of QA practice from script maintenance to intelligent, risk-based, AI-assisted quality engineering
- Drive upskilling across the function — building capability in AI tooling, context engineering, and agent-assisted workflows
- Manage resistance and build confidence in new ways of working; bring the team through change without losing them
- Communicate quality outcomes in business terms to senior stakeholders — escaped defect rates, release stability, risk posture
- Release Management
- Own the release quality process end-to-end: environment strategy, regression coverage, go/no-go decisions, and post-release monitoring
- Embed shift-left practices — quality gates early in the PDLC, not just at release
- Manage the tension between delivery velocity and release stability, particularly as AI-generated code volumes increase
Our take
The energy landscape is one of the most dynamic and fast-evolving sectors in the world. More and more energy retailers are looking to move further toward digitisation and reap the benefits of modern technology in an increasingly connected world. But many are struggling with the transition, held back by legacy operating systems which slow them down, drain resources, and hamper innovation.
This is where Kaluza comes in. An ecosystem of platforms whose services range from energy billing to smart electric vehicle charging, Its real-time cloud platforms transform supplier operations, reducing the cost to serve and boosting customer engagement. Essentially, its platform is aimed at helping businesses streamline their operations, saving them time, effort, and money which can be better invested elsewhere.
Kaluza is riding the momentum of a growing desire for sustainable business and services. Its program relating to electric car charging, for example, will be able to capitalise on huge new demand in that sector - over 100,000 electric cars are already on the roads in the UK, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance has predicted that electric cars will account for over 50% of new global car sales by 2040. As the globe moves further towards sustainable use of energy in the coming years, Kaluza could be very well positioned to capitalise.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
33% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Jun 2024
$100m
LATE VC
Total funding: $100m
Company benefits
- Progressive leave policies - including leave dedicated to the moments that matter to you the most
- Annual discretionary bonus
- Dedicated personal learning and home office budgets
- Flexible working — we trust you to work in a way that suits your lifestyle
- 26 days holiday
- Kaluza Share Scheme
Company HQ
Kensington, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Melissa Gander
(CEO)Initially joined Kaluza as COO before becoming CEO in 2024. Previously worked at OVO Energy in a number of roles, including Managing Director of Smart Metering and Group COO. Prior to that, they worked at INEXUS as a Process and Performance Analyst and a Customer Manager.
People progressing
Joined as Senior Technical Product Manager in 2017, promoted after 2 years to Head of Product, promoted again in 2024 to their current position as Director of Product.
Joined Kaluza in 2020 as a Software Engineer, and in less than 2 years was promoted to Software Engineering Manager and again promoted in 2023 to Senior Software Engineer.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Kaluza
- We are developing an dedicated Early Talent programme with a focus on underrepresented groups, offering different training opportunities within the business
- Our applicant tracking system, Greenhouse, also anonymously tracks the diversity of each candidate pipeline, so we can proactively take action when a pipeline needs to be more diverse
- We invest in tools, like Textio, and focused diversity job boards to help us reduce bias in our job postings and recruitment activity
- Commitment in improving diversity across our Tech Teams and working with companies to improve the tech ecosystem as a whole, specifically have committed to 25% Women in Tech by 2025
- We've signed up to numerous charters, like the Tech Talent Charter, Race at Work Charter and Trans in the City, to show our continuing commitment to improving I&D within Kaluza and the wider community
- Within Kaluza we have belonging communities set up, to offer support and forums for everybody
- We run monthly Inclusive Hiring Skills & Bias training that are open to all Kaluza employees
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