About the Company
Davidson has partnered with Barwon Water to appoint a Testing & QA Lead to join its Digital Engineering team and lead the uplift of modern testing and quality assurance practices across the organisation.
Barwon Water delivers water, sewerage and recycled water services to more than 330,000 people across the Geelong region and surrounding communities. Through a major Digital Business Transformation program, the organisation is investing in new technologies, operating models and ways of working that will shape the future of the business and the communities it serves.
About the Role
This is an exciting opportunity for a senior testing professional to shape Barwon Water’s testing strategy, standards, automation frameworks, tooling and release assurance capability. Reporting to the Head of Digital Engineering, you’ll provide strategic and technical leadership across digital solutions, platforms and emerging agentic AI-enabled services.
We’re looking for someone who is passionate about modern quality engineering, can influence without direct authority and knows how to balance delivery speed with quality, risk, cost, security and user impact.
About You
You’re an experienced Testing and QA Lead who knows how to embed quality throughout the delivery lifecycle rather than treating testing as a final checkpoint. You combine strong testing expertise with a pragmatic, risk-based approach and can influence engineering teams to build quality into the way they design, develop and release technology.
You’re comfortable working across multiple squads and stakeholders, providing clear visibility of quality and risk while keeping delivery moving.
Core Strengths
- Strong experience with test management tools such as Zephyr within Jira, alongside modern test automation frameworks.
- Proven ability to embed automated testing into CI/CD pipelines, including appropriate build, test and release gates.
- Strong capability in release assurance and defect management, translating quality insights into clear actions for both engineering teams and business stakeholders.
- A pragmatic, risk-based approach to quality, maintaining high standards without becoming a blocker to delivery.
- Strong understanding of the end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, with the ability to identify where quality risks are introduced as well as where they surface.
- Demonstrated ability to improve testing maturity across multiple squads, building capability and influencing teams without relying on formal authority.
Also Valuable
- Exposure to AI-assisted and agentic testing, applied responsibly within appropriate security and governance guardrails.
- Experience working within Agile delivery environments, including sprints, ceremonies and continuous feedback loops.
- Experience with test environment and test data management, including the use of observability to improve testing insights.
- Knowledge of release management practices, including cutover planning, rollback strategies and post-release verification.
- Experience with non-functional testing, including performance, resilience and security testing in partnership with platform or engineering teams.
- Experience assuring complex change across a mixed technology estate, including cloud platforms, SaaS products, integrations and vendor-delivered systems.
Please apply with current resume in Microsoft Word format only (.doc or .docx). If you would like to have a confidential discussion, please contact Adnan Haidermota on adnan.haidermota@davidsonwp.com, quoting reference JN -082026-44070. Want to know more about Davidson? Visit us at www.davidsonwp.com
