Head of Quality Assurance

Archax is an FCA-regulated exchange, broker and custodian for digital assets, targeted at professional and institutional clients. Our services cover all types of digital assets – from cryptocurrencies to NFTs to digital securities – as well as traditional financial instruments too. Our vision is to develop a truly digital capital markets ecosystem that bridges traditional and crypto markets, leveraging tokenisation and blockchain/DLT/Web3.0 technologies.

*** This is an office based role, you must be able to commute to and work in the City of London as a norm***

Head of Quality Assurance - reporting to the CTO

Archax has reached a growth point in its development and an opportunity has arisen for an experienced Head of Quality Assurance to join the team. They will bring many years of experience supporting a wide variety of systems and technologies preferably from a capital markets environment. The successful applicant will also have worked in an environment where internal developers have built internal capital markets/trading software.

They will provide overarching leadership of the quality assurance function and ongoing project-based engineering work across the technology estate, including Nodejs and C++ applications. The team is growing but currently consists of 8 QA engineers, this is expected to grow over the next 12 months.

Applicants will have a strong engineering background, be ambitious, bright, motivated and have substantial experience in a highly technical role. Archax is a highly regulated fintech scale-up so experience of working in a rapidly evolving fluid company is vital. The successful applicant must have experience in a firm that has delivered product to external customers.

Key Responsibilities:

• Strategic leadership of the QA function including management of tools
• Ensuring the construction and running of testing processes including UAT, regression testing, engaging with partner and client teams to ensure these are useful, productive, and run smoothly.
• QA leadership of large, cross-functional projects either directly or via the QA team
• Manage the Engineering QA team, including Lead QA
• Build out a wider QA/Test team to work with Business systems, transformation, and others to improve QA practice.
• Identify gaps in QA function and work with engineering and business leads to build a strategy to fill them
• Work alongside the QA team to deliver testing inline with developer output.
• Reporting key quality metrics to senior stakeholders

Key Selection Criteria:

• Ability to lead test and QA strategy across multiple teams
• Ability to line manage teams and manage managers and lead-level positions
• Can construct and manage a small-medium sized QA organisation
• Can coach, manage and mentor the QAs and QA Leads/managers
• Strong collaborative sense, doesn't throw things over the wall
• Strong history of working in C++, Typescript, Nodejs
• Framework experience with Cucumber, Zephyr Scale
• Capable working daily with SQL
• Experience performance testing of APIs, Web-Apps and Websites highly beneficial
• Experience with CI tools (eg. Jenkins etc)
• Prior API Testing work with REST, Asynchronous WebSocket, FIX
• Experience with capital markets
• Understanding of crypto/securities trading
• Experience producing and reporting management information related QA

Other required Skillsets/Traits:

• Ability and willingness to take ownership, responsibility and accountability of projects
• Excellent project management skills
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Strong analytical skills including problem solving and solution-orientated thinking
• Energetic personality with the drive to effect change and develop relationships across all levels of the business
• Degree or relevant industry qualifications

Benefits:

• Competitive salary.
• Discretionary bonus.
• Company pension scheme.
• Comprehensive private healthcare scheme.
• Death in service benefit.
• 25 days holiday. Increasing by one day each year up to 30 days.
• Extra day’s holiday for birthday. 
• Being part of an entrepreneurial, exciting, fast-growing, and future thinking company.
• Opportunities to attend events representing Archax and its vision.
• Encouragement and support in your personal career development and industry knowledge.