Five years at easyJet, and the scale of this role was unlike anything I had tackled before: 120 testing professionals, a £10m budget, and quality coverage across every corner of a major airline’s technology estate, from customer-facing digital products to operational systems that keep aircraft flying. My focus was always on building something sustainable: a QE organisation with genuine capability, clear principles, and the culture to keep improving without needing me in the room.

• Member of the Technology Leadership Team, reporting to the Director of Technology and shaping direction for the wider IT organisation
• Owned a £10m annual budget covering permanent staff, training, supplier resourcing, and tools/licensing
• Led a £2m+ RFP process to onboard a new Quality Engineering partner, focused on Automation, Test Environments and Test Architecture
• Authored and published easyJet’s Quality Engineering Principles, underpinning all QE activity across the organisation
• Line managed the Senior QE Leadership team of 6 Senior QE Managers and the Lead QE Architect
• Established a Quality Engineering Transformation Group introducing new roles: QE Architects, Test Environment Managers, and SDETs
• Led the rebranding from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering, including a company-wide education and awareness programme
• Managed strategic supplier relationships across onshore, nearshore and offshore testing services
• Served on the IT Crisis Management Team (rotating on-call), coordinating IT response to operational incidents, cyber events and infrastructure failures
• Co-chaired the Disability Empowerment Network: a DEI employee community supporting colleagues with all disabilities across the business

Stepped into a broader remit following the pandemic restructure, leading testing across easyJet’s entire digital estate: Web, Mobile, Customer Contact Centre and supporting back-end systems, alongside end-to-end project test coordination across all technology functions.

• Led a team of 30+ testers, test managers, and test architects (permanent and third-party)
• Built a modern QE strategy for all digital testing, shifting left on Performance, Security, and all forms of Test Automation
• Introduced Requirement Testability Assessments and Risk-Based Testing across the function
• Founded and ran the internal Test Guild: a community of practice for improving testing practices across easyJet

Hired to establish a centralised QA function supporting all platform teams: from Digital (Web and Mobile) through to Airline Operations, HR and Payroll systems.

• Defined test strategy for the centralised function and created reusable templates across testing teams
• Built an Automation Strategy to complement manual testing with targeted automation investment
• Managed offshore team for end-to-end regression; introduced shift-left practices to involve QA earlier in delivery

After a decade of growing from graduate developer into QA Lead, I moved into my first management role at McAfee, looking after QA teams across two product lines in Aylesbury (UK) and Cork (Ireland).

• Line managed two QA teams including hiring, performance reviews, and coaching on QA best practices
• Defined test strategies and quality metrics for production releases; established combinatorial test environment modelling to optimise coverage
• Collaborated with Content Release Operations to ensure daily content shipped at high quality
• Acted as QA stakeholder for all projects, embedding quality requirements from project inception

Led QA activities for the Production Operations team: defining testing approaches, coordinating releases, and coaching junior testers.

Led QA for McAfee’s core Anti-Virus Engine team, defining test strategies for complex security software and working closely with engineering.

Started career as a C++ software developer before moving into QA. Held Scrum Master responsibilities across a 4-year period, facilitating Agile delivery practices across engineering teams.