Senior Manager - QA & Release

About the Team: Enterprise Systems is the backbone of GSK’s internal operations in Digital & Tech, enabling GSK Global Functions teams such as Finance, Procurement, HR, Legal, Compliance, WREF, CGA and Corporate Secretariat to run seamlessly. This team designs and delivers cutting-edge digital platforms that power critical processes, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and scalability across the enterprise.       Our HR Digital & Tech team transforms how GSK attracts, develops, and retains talent through innovative technology solutions. From managing global HR platforms to delivering data-driven insights, this function ensures our people have the tools and experiences they need to thrive. Partnering closely with HR business teams, we create solutions that simplify processes, enhance employee engagement, and enable strategic workforce planning. If you’re passionate about technology that empowers people, this is where you can make an impact. Job Purpose: The QA & Release Senior Manager is responsible for supporting quality assurance practices and coordinating release management activities across the HR Digital & Technology product portfolio. Working across all HR products, the role ensures that changes are tested to a consistent standard, release readiness criteria are met, and releases are coordinated and communicated effectively across product teams and stakeholders. The role supports the delivery of reliable, secure, and compliant changes by embedding quality activities throughout the delivery lifecycle and maintaining visibility of upcoming releases across the portfolio. Working closely with Product Owners, delivery teams, and service teams, the QA & Release Senior Manager helps ensure that quality is designed-in from refinement through to post-go-live, while supporting a structured and well-governed release process that protects service stability and business outcomes. This role operates under GSK's "Performance with Choice" hybrid working approach, typically expecting 2–3 days per week in the office, with the specific pattern agreed between the successful candidate and their manager based on role and team needs. Key Responsibilities: Quality Assurance - Support the implementation of QA standards and test approaches across the HR product portfolio, ensuring functional, regression, integration, and user acceptance testing is carried out consistently across product teams. - Work with Product Owners and delivery teams to define acceptance criteria, test coverage expectations, and quality gates, ensuring requirements are testable and supported by clear pass/fail criteria. - Execute and coordinate test activities across product teams, including functional testing, regression testing, integration testing, and supporting user acceptance testing, ensuring defects are clearly documented and triaged. - Apply risk-based testing approaches to prioritise effort across critical services, high-transaction workflows, regulated processes, and cross-product integrations, escalating quality risks to senior stakeholders where required. - Support the adoption and maintenance of test automation, contributing to automated regression, API testing, and data integrity checks, and ensuring test scripts are maintained and reusable across releases. - Ensure non-functional requirements (performance, security, accessibility, operability) are clearly defined and tested prior to release, partnering with Security, Risk, and Compliance teams where required. - Manage defect lifecycle processes, ensuring issues are logged, triaged, prioritised, and tracked through to resolution, and that defect trends are analysed to inform continuous improvement. Release Management - Maintain and coordinate the release calendar across the HR product portfolio, ensuring all product teams have visibility of upcoming releases, dependencies, and sequencing. - Support release readiness assessments by coordinating release checklists, confirming test completion, gathering signoffs, and ensuring documentation (release notes, runbooks, rollback plans) is complete and accurate prior to deployment. - Coordinate release communications across product teams, business stakeholders, and Service Operations, ensuring impacted parties are informed of release scope, timing, and any known risks or workarounds. - Support change control processes, ensuring releases follow required governance and approval workflows and that evidence of testing, risk assessment, and stakeholder sign-off is documented and auditable. - Support go-live and hypercare activities, monitoring for release-related incidents, coordinating triage across product teams, and ensuring issues are escalated and resolved in a timely manner. - Documents and tracks release outcomes and contribute to post-release reviews, capturing lessons learned, analysing release success rates, and identifying opportunities to improve release processes and reduce release-related incidents. - Use approved AI tools in your day-to-day work to improve your own productivity and your team’s ways of working, sharing what works and applying sound judgement, including validating outputs and following GSK’s Responsible AI, privacy and security requirements. Required Skills & Qualification: - Bachelor’s or master’s degree in business, Information Technology, Project/Programme Management, or equivalent experience. - 10+ years of experience working in QA, testing, release management, or delivery support roles within technology or digital environments. - Experience executing and coordinating test activities including functional, regression, integration, and user acceptance testing across one or more platforms or products. - Experience supporting or coordinating release processes, including release scheduling, readiness assessments, and release communications. - Familiarity with defect management processes, including logging, triaging, and tracking defects through to resolution. - Exposure to test automation approaches, including contributing to or maintaining automated regression or API test scripts. - Awareness of change control, governance, and compliance requirements within enterprise environments. - Experience working within agile or product-based delivery environments and contributing to iterative planning, testing, and release practices. - Experience working across multiple teams or workstreams, coordinating testing or release activity to support aligned delivery. - Professional certifications desirable (e.g., ITSM, etc). Preferred Skills: - Strong attention to detail, able to identify, document, and communicate defects and quality risks clearly and accurately. - Good communication skills, able to coordinate across multiple product teams and communicate release schedules, readiness status, and quality findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. - Organised and structured in approach, able to manage multiple concurrent testing and release activities, maintain accurate documentation, and track progress across product teams under time pressure. - Developing analytical skills, able to identify defect trends, assess test coverage, and contribute insights that support continuous improvement in quality and release practices. - Comfortable working in a matrixed environment, building relationships across product teams and coordinating activity without direct line authority. - Ability to work in a very fast-paced and fluid environment - Comfortable with ambiguity and change Skills Knowledge Management, Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), Penetration Testing, Quality Assurance (QA), Quality Assurance Analysis, Regression Testing, Release Management, Scripting, Test Automation Framework, Test Case Design, Test Management Tools, Tool Selection, User Acceptance Testing (UAT)   Why GSK? Uniting science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. GSK is a global biopharma company with a purpose to unite science, technology and talent to get ahead of disease together. We aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people by the end of the decade, as a successful, growing company where people can thrive. We get ahead of disease by preventing and treating it with innovation in specialty medicines and vaccines. We focus on four therapeutic areas: respiratory, immunology and inflammation; oncology; HIV; and infectious diseases – to impact health at scale. People and patients around the world count on the medicines and vaccines we make, so we’re committed to creating an environment where our people can thrive and focus on what matters most. Our culture of being ambitious for patients, accountable for impact and doing the right thing is the foundation for how, together, we deliver for patients, shareholders and our people. 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