Director of Quality & Release Engineering

Job title: Director, Quality & Release EngineeringLocation: London or Bristol (Hybrid Office - 3+ days per week)Salary: £150,000 - £180,000Team: Quality & ReleaseLevel: Director This role is based in London or Bristol and requires existing right to work in the UK. At this time, we are not able to offer visa sponsorship for this role. We are committed to building a diverse, global team and our sponsorship policy is evaluated on a role-by-role basis. We encourage you to keep an eye on our careers site to stay informed about future opportunities where we are able to offer visa sponsorship. Kaluza is the Energy Intelligence Platform, turning energy complexity into seamless coordination. We help energy companies overcome today’s challenges while accelerating the shift to a clean, electrified future. Our platform orchestrates millions of real-time decisions across homes, devices, markets and grids. By combining predictive algorithms with human-centred design, Kaluza makes clean energy dependable, affordable and adaptive to everyday life. With teams across Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, and a joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan, we power leading companies including OVO, AGL and ENGIE, as well as innovators like Volvo and Volkswagen. What will I be doing? The quality engineering function is shifting from manual oversight and process governance toward an AI-assisted product development lifecycle where QA leads its own domain test strategy and bespoke tooling drives automation maturity. This role will drive this shift in our organization and ways of working. You will own quality and release governance at programme level, directly manage an engineering team building AI-assisted automation and test data capability, and set the standard that QA leads across delivery streams work to. You will be as comfortable driving change as you are accountable for outcomes. Responsibilities will include: Strategic Quality Leadership Own and evolve the quality strategy across delivery streams, aligned to programme objectives and client SLAsDefine and maintain release governance frameworks — release readiness criteria, risk acceptance, and sign-off authoritiesSet quality standards and coverage expectations; ensure QA leads translate these into domain-level test strategiesDrive defect governance at programme level — internal and client-facing SLA complianceRepresent quality and risk in senior leadership, architecture, and product forums AI-Driven Tooling & Automation Directly manage a team of engineers building and maintaining bespoke automation tooling, leveraging AI and LLM capabilitiesOwn the test data management strategy — including AI-assisted synthetic data generation and environment data integrityEvaluate and select off-the-shelf AI testing tools; define governance frameworks for their use and validationEnsure governance gates are maintained as AI participation in the PDLC grows — accountable humans must remain in the loop for risk acceptance and production judgementEstablish tooling standards that QA leads can adopt across domains without creating dependency on a central bottleneck QA Function Leadership & Operating Model Lead, develop, and performance-manage QA leads embedded across domains; define the operating model and career framework for the functionOwn the accountability split clearly: QA leads own test strategy and tooling choices for their domain; this role owns the standard they work toDrive consistency across streams without becoming a handoff point — enable QA leads to move fast within well-defined guardrailsBuild a quality engineering culture — not a bug-finding one Change Management & Adoption Lead the transformation of QA practice from script maintenance to intelligent, risk-based, AI-assisted quality engineeringDrive upskilling across the function — building capability in AI tooling, context engineering, and agent-assisted workflowsManage resistance and build confidence in new ways of working; bring the team through change without losing themCommunicate quality outcomes in business terms to senior stakeholders — escaped defect rates, release stability, risk posture Release Management Own the release quality process end-to-end: environment strategy, regression coverage, go/no-go decisions, and post-release monitoringEmbed shift-left practices — quality gates early in the PDLC, not just at releaseManage the tension between delivery velocity and release stability, particularly as AI-generated code volumes increase About You Ideally you’ll have/be Proven track record leading a QA or quality engineering function of significant scale — including embedded domain leads and direct management of practitionersHas directly managed engineers building tooling or automation infrastructure — not just managed QA practitioners executing test plansHas delivered a meaningful QA transformation: AI adoption, automation maturity uplift, defect governance overhaul, or similarHas worked in a multi-client or multi-product platform environment, managing quality outcomes across concurrent delivery streamsHas owned release governance in a complex, multi-stream delivery context — including go/no-go accountabilityExposure to energy, utilities, billing, or similarly regulated complex domains is a plus — not essential Strong grounding in test strategy, automation frameworks, and CI/CD integration — sufficient to credibly lead engineers building these thingsWorking knowledge of LLMs and AI tooling in a QA context: test generation, defect triage, coverage analysis, synthetic test dataUnderstands test data management principles and the challenges of environment data integrity at scaleAble to evaluate build vs. buy for tooling; assess AI testing platforms with appropriate scepticism Comfortable setting strategy and being accountable for outcomes — not just owning processAble to operate at programme level with senior engineering and product stakeholdersExperienced in leading distributed, multi-timezone quality functionsStrong communicator — translates quality metrics into business outcomes; can make the case for investment in tooling and governance Demonstrated experience leading practice transformation in an engineering contextAble to bring people with them through transitions that challenge established ways of workingComfortable with ambiguity; can hold direction steady while the detail is still being worked outFamiliar with observability, production monitoring, and shift-right quality practices Where you'll work We offer flexible working, with an expectation of 3 days a week in the office. This gives us the best of both: real time together to collaborate and build relationships, with the flexibility to work in the way that suits you best the rest of the week. Kaluza Values Here at Kaluza we have five core values that guide us as a business: Play to win, Solve the real problem, Build trust every day, Own the outcome, Go further together. Our Perks Pension SchemeDiscretionary Bonus SchemePrivate Medical Insurance + Virtual GPLife AssuranceAccess to Furthr - a Climate Action appFree Mortgage Advice and Eye TestsPerks at Work - access to thousands of retail discounts5% Flex Fund - to spend on the benefits you want most26 days holidayProgressive Leave Policy - With no qualifying service periods, including 26 weeks full pay if you have a new addition to your familyPersonal Learning Budget - Upskill, learn and grow!Home Office Budget And more! We want the best people We’re keen to meet people from all walks of life — our view is that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We want to build teams which represent a variety of experiences, perspectives and skills, and we recognise talent on the basis of merit and potential. We understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they tick every box. But if you're excited about joining us and think you have some of what we're looking for, even if you're not 100% sure, we'd still love to hear from you. Find out more about working in Kaluza on our careers page and LinkedIn.