Bilingual QA Lead

Job Description This role leads the establishment of quality engineering practices across a modern application landscape, enabling engineers to fully own quality in their day‑to‑day work. You will design standards, frameworks, and coaching models that leave a sustainable impact beyond the assignment. Description * Define and drive an organisation‑wide quality engineering strategy aligned with business and engineering goals * Establish a shared definition of "good quality," including reliability, performance, security, and usability * Create and maintain QA standards, guidelines, templates, and best practices across engineering teams * Standardise and select test frameworks and tools for unit, integration, API, UI, performance, and security testing * Coach and enable engineers to design, implement, and maintain automated and manual tests * Embed testing and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with engineering and CI/CD teams * Integrate QA activities into Agile and hybrid SDLC processes and release workflows * Define quality metrics, dashboards, and reporting for teams and leadership * Use data to identify systemic quality issues and drive continuous improvement * Partner with architecture, platform, security, and product stakeholders to embed quality into solution design * Support test environment strategy, test data management, and non‑functional testing * Act as a trusted advisor and subject matter expert on quality engineering practices * Facilitate communities of practice or quality guilds * Design a clear exit strategy, including documentation, playbooks, and internal champions Profile * 4+ years of experience in software QA or quality engineering across multiple systems or products * 1+ year in a QA lead, quality architect, or similar role influencing team or organisational practices * Proven experience building or significantly improving QA practices in low‑maturity environments * Strong hands‑on experience with test automation for APIs and/or UIs using mainstream languages and frameworks * Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and defining quality gates * Strong understanding of non‑functional testing (performance, reliability, security, usability) * High emotional intelligence with a coaching and influencing mindset * Business‑level Japanese communication skills for technical and non‑technical stakeholders * Comfortable working in distributed or virtual team environments Preferred experience * Quality metrics and data‑driven improvement initiatives * QA Centre of Excellence or cross‑team enablement models * Secure development and security testing practices * Performance and load testing tools * Modern architectures such as microservices or cloud‑native systems * Agile delivery environments and shift‑left testing approaches * Experience delivering internal training or workshops Job Offer * High‑visibility role shaping quality engineering across a major financial organisation * Exposure to modern cloud technologies and enterprise‑scale systems * Close collaboration with architecture, platform, security, and product teams * Access to global learning platforms and certification programs