Full Description

Programme Test Manager

Location: London

Role Type: Permanent

Work Setup: Hybrid (50% in the workplace)

Salary: £750 Who We Are We have an exciting new opportunity for a Programme Test Manager to Join Robert Walters as a Workforce Consultant. As an Employed Workforce Consultant, you will benefit from permanent employment with Robert Walters and will be deployed on an interim or project basis into our clients' organisations, in return we will provide you with an opportunity to develop your skills with ongoing training and professional accreditations.

The role We are seeking candidates with experience leading end-to-end test strategies for complex, business-critical programmes, ensuring performance, resilience, and compliance across cloud, hybrid, and on-prem environments in a highly regulated financial context. What You'll Do Programme Test Strategy & Governance Own and define the Programme Test Strategy, including non-functional and performance testing, with full traceability from requirements to validated outcomes. Establish governance, entry/exit criteria, and quality gates aligned to risk and audit frameworks. Provide independent quality assessments to programme boards and executives. Performance & Non-Functional Leadership Lead performance, load, stress, volume, endurance testing, validating resilience under peak and failover scenarios. Integrate performance testing into CI/CD pipelines and oversee daily activities, including environment readiness, defect trends, and assurance reporting. Diagnose bottlenecks across distributed systems and recommend remediation. Technical Oversight Manage performance tools (e.g., JMeter, LoadRunner, Gatling, Eggplant Performance) and leverage observability and diagnostics platforms (e.g., Grafana, Splunk, New Relic, Dynatrace). Ensure coverage across cloud-native and hybrid environments (Azure, AWS, GCP), including containers (Docker, Kubernetes) and data platforms (data bricks). Embed security, compliance, and resilience within testing. Stakeholder & Vendor Management Act as senior escalation point for test risks and constraints. Manage third-party suppliers against SLAs/KPIs and engage senior technology, risk, and operational stakeholders. Reporting & Assurance Deliver programme-level dashboards (RAG, defect leakage, NFR coverage, risk exposure) and support go/no-go decisions. Maintain audit-ready documentation. Team Leadership Lead Test Managers and workstream Test Leads across SIT, UAT, NFT, and resilience phases. Promote automation-first, shift-left practices and foster a collaborative, high-performing team culture.

What You Bring Proven experience as a Programme Test Manager on large-scale critical infrastructure programmes. Strong knowledge of NFRs and risk-based test strategies, including integration of performance testing into CI/CD pipelines. Understanding of cloud architectures (Azure, AWS, GCP), with familiarity in observability and diagnostic tools. Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, excellent communication and stakeholder management, with the ability to operate effectively in fast-paced, regulated environments. Knowledge of middleware (Kafka, IBM MQ), ELK, Tableau, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and Git are desirable. Background in central banking or systemically important financial institutions, with an understanding of payments, RTGS, or high-availability platforms are preferred