Stuart Thomas Email & Phone Number

Brighton & Hove, Sussex, Gb

Oxford, Oxfordshire, Gb

London, England, Gb

In March 2023, my role was expanded to a broader Engineering Management position.• Provide engineering leadership and people management for two development teams (platform engineering team and a product development team), while retaining overall responsibility for Quality.• Team Management: Manage a diverse team of around 20 cross discipline engineers and managers.

London, England, Gb

• Promoted to Quality Engineering Manager: Responsible for overall quality in Zoopla's business-to-business unit.• People Management: Managed and supported 12 reports - 8 Quality Engineers and 4 Software Engineers.• Quality Strategy: Led the development of a Quality Strategy that empowered all disciplines to own Quality and Testing within their areas of expertise. Increased engagement with Quality across the Software Development Life Cycle.• Holistic Testing Model: Created the Zoopla Holistic Testing Model, which visualizes Quality and testing at all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle.• Coaching and Mentoring: Provided proactive coaching and mentoring for all disciplines to help drive a quality-first culture. Supported personal and professional development goals through regular 1:1s.• Platform Contributions: Major contributor to the development of our deployment pipeline and observability platform. Enabling teams to gather feedback faster and more broadly across the application.• Out of Hours Support: Seized an opportunity to build on our observability platform work to launch a new Out of Hours support process that allows us to remedy issues before customers are impacted.• Testing Frameworks: Proactively created Proofs of Concept and led programmes centred around engineering excellence, including migration of our Functional test suite from Selenium to Playwright and introducing, extending and improving our use of k6 for Non-Functional performance testing.• Community of Practice: Sponsored Zoopla's Quality and Risk Community of Practice. Engaged the broader Quality community to across business units to collaborate and learn together, as well as provide guidance and support to cross-discipline members. • Upskilling: Helped Quality Engineers with non-technical backgrounds upskill to undertake non-functional testing, contribute to automated test frameworks and support them with ongoing learning.

London, England, Gb

• Entry into Quality: Joined Zoopla's flagship CRM System team. Developed a deep understanding of Quality and Software Development processes. Identified opportunities for improvement and implemented changes to enhance our ways of working.• UI Testing Framework: Created a reliable and easy-to-maintain UI testing framework using C# and Specflow that reduced lead time to deployment by 480 hours.• API Testing Framework: Led the creation and implementation of an API testing framework using RestSharp, increasing confidence in releases and providing a template for future tests as we moved to a Microservices architecture.• Improved Customer Support Methods: Developed improved methods for customer support teams to engage engineering teams, resulting in a more empowered support team, less interrupted engineering team, and increased customer satisfaction.

London, England, Gb

• Conducted structured training sessions at clients' offices.• Delivered custom 'advanced' training for existing customers that optimized their use of our CRM systems.

Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, Gb