Resume
Shaj Imran Khan — Test Manager & Quality Engineering Lead
Test Manager · Quality Engineering Lead
- +44 (0) 770 990 77 99
- shaj.ece@gmail.com
- shaj.uk
- /in/shajimrankhan
- Runcorn, UK
- Right to Work: Yes (ILR)
17+ yrs
UK financial services QA
85%
Defect leakage reduction
97%
Regression automation coverage
TMMi 2 → 4
Test process maturity uplift
Professional Profile
Test Manager with 17 years of experience in UK financial services, specialising in end-to-end test management, release governance and quality-gate enforcement across large-scale Waterfall and Agile delivery programmes, including system migrations and major upgrades. Track record of placing strong quality controls and exit criteria over internal and third-party test deliverables, slashing defect leakage and providing clear Go/No-Go release recommendations to senior stakeholders and steering committees. At Coventry Building Society (formerly The Co-operative Bank), owned a single test strategy across 7 concurrent SAFe scrums and four programmes, leading 22 QA professionals across onshore and offshore teams and four strategic vendors. Combines deep regulatory assurance experience (FCA/PRA environment) with hands-on automation proficiency (Playwright, Selenium) and a track record of building testing capability and driving test-practice transformation at an organisational level.
Professional Experience
Test Manager / ART Test Lead · Coventry Building Society (formerly The Co-operative Bank)
Sep 2017 – Jun 2026Manchester / Remote
Owned a single test strategy across 7 concurrent SAFe scrums and four programmes (Retail AO, SME AO, SCO, RB&CB AO), functionally leading 22 QA professionals (4 onshore, 18 offshore) across four strategic vendors — IBM, Cognizant, Capgemini and Publicis Sapient.
Programme Leadership & Governance
- Orchestrated unified E2E quality governance across four simultaneous programmes within a SAFe structure, establishing a single test strategy across 4 strategic vendors.
Release Governance & Stakeholder Reporting
- Owned release governance across the value stream, facilitating Go/No-Go decisions and providing release recommendations as a member of the programme steering committee, supported by executive- and team-level test reporting and MI dashboards.
Automation & Engineering
- Achieved 97% regression automation coverage via GitLab CI/CD (Serenity BDD, Provar, Postman) and pioneered mobile service-virtualisation, bypassing legacy blockers to boost sprint velocity by 30% and cut execution time by 40%.
Quality Gates & Defect-Leakage Reduction
- Introduced quality gates and entry/exit criteria on the Retail AOR programme, reducing defect leakage by over 85%.
- Applied a shift-left approach and risk-based test-optimisation exercise that shortened the test cycle while strengthening release assurance.
- Maintained zero severe production defect leakage across 30+ major feature releases and base rate changes (BCOBS/JMLSG compliant).
Third-Party Test Assurance
- Governed test deliverables across 4 strategic vendors (IBM, Cognizant, Capgemini, Publicis Sapient), enforcing test approach, phase test plans and exit criteria over third-party system testing to ensure only quality-assured outputs entered downstream integration, SIT and UAT phases.
Capability Building & Team Leadership
- Recruited, interviewed, onboarded and line-managed a team of 5 permanent test leads and engineers, developing testing capability across the value stream and growing in-house automation and domain expertise.
Test Process Standardisation (TMMi)
- Drove a structured test process improvement initiative that matured the organisation's testing capability from TMMi Level 2 to Level 4, standardising test approach, governance and metrics to deliver consistent, measurable quality across programmes.
Non-Functional & Security Governance
- Directed critical non-functional testing phases — Performance, Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) and Penetration Test coordination — to safeguard enterprise security and system resilience under load.
Test Manager · Cognizant Technology Solutions — Computershare Limited
2015 – 2017Melbourne / Chennai
Highlights
- Led an enterprise-wide quality transformation across superannuation administration products, implementing Shift-Left, Risk-Based Testing (RBT) and IT-UAT Harmonisations that improved overall testing velocity by 30%.
- Served as Scrum Master within the Nexus scaled Agile framework, actively resolving cross-squad dependencies and improving sprint predictability across multiple delivery teams.
- Engineered 7+ custom test automation utilities, significantly reducing manual functional testing cycles and accelerating major product releases.
Test Lead & Analyst · Cognizant Technology Solutions — Lloyds Banking Group plc
2009 – 2014Edinburgh / Chennai
Highlights
- Architected an E2E testing framework for a multi-year £5M+ payments transformation, performing critical gap analysis in direct collaboration with IT Architects.
- Managed core banking migrations and engineered a custom utility for a mainframe Payments module processing 5,607 transactions, driving an automation-first culture that reduced manual testing overhead by 40%.
- Pioneered an early SIT phase to intercept critical integration defects pre-production, successfully reducing defect leakage across major regulatory programmes (FATCA, SEPA).
Core Competencies
Test Management
Testing Types
Domain
Methodologies
Technical Skills / Tools
Emerging Skills
Education
MBA — Project Management
Sikkim Manipal University · 2014–2016
BE — Electronics & Communications Engineering
Anna University · 2005–2009
Certifications
- ISTQB Specialist — AI Tester (CT-AI) — 2026
- ISTQB Specialist — Testing with Generative AI (CT-GenAI) — 2026
- ISTQB Advanced Level Test Manager (CTAL-ATM) — 2014
- Project Management Professional (PMP®) — 2016
- PRINCE2® Practitioner — 2017
- Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) — 2016
- TMMi® Professional — 2017
- Certified Software Quality Manager (CSQM) — 2017
- CompTIA Project+ — 2016