Chris Bramley

Principal Test Engineer & Engineering Leader

I'm an experienced technical leader in both management and individual contributor roles, with a record of delivering measurable outcomes through strategic quality initiatives, cross-functional collaboration, and engineering maturity uplift.

My focus is bringing Testing and Quality into the AI era, by fundamentally changing the way quality outcomes are achieved at scale.

I specialise in aligning testing strategy with business outcomes, scaling high-quality engineering practices, and driving compliance and reliability at pace. I mentor senior quality and engineering leaders, shape large-scale quality transformations, and embed pragmatic, AI and automated testing practices across organisations.

I'm also deeply passionate about the Developer Experience and how to make it possible for any engineer to do the right thing, in the easiest way.

I've created this site to showcase my work, link of to some projects I've worked on (including this site), and publish my thoughts on the future to a blog.

If you'd like to know more about me, an overview of my CV is below, but I've also had a deep and meaningful chat with... ChatGPT. Just to try something different.

Visit my blog Read full ChatGPT Q&A View featured work Get in touch

Experience

Principal Test Engineer (Enterprise Quality Strategy & Governance)

Feb 2021 – Present

•Senior quality leader within Booking.com’s Central Technology Enterprise Architecture / Engineering Enablement organisation, providing strategic direction, governance, and enablement for testing and quality across global product and platform teams.
•Co-authored and implemented a company-wide Quality Strategy, setting standards for testability, automation, release readiness, and risk-based validation across hundreds of engineers.
•Led adoption of GenAI-assisted testing, including test case and test data generation, through guidelines, prompt frameworks, and hands-on workshops.
•Led Developer Experience guiding principal across all business units, with >80% adoption and >10% improvement in engineering maturity.
•Defined and delivered shared quality assets including a central testing knowledge base, SonarQube quality and releasability profiles, and DORA-aligned evaluation models used across business units.
•Led quality strategy, testing governance, and release oversight for the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) rollout, including coordinated fire drills, production monitoring, and staged rollouts.
•Designed and delivered scalable training initiatives to uplift testing and engineering capability across multiple business units.

Senior Engineering Manager – Test

Feb 2019 – Feb 2021

•Led a globally distributed organisation of ~40 direct and indirect reports across Manchester, London, and Amsterdam.
•Defined and rolled out company-wide Test Engineering career frameworks, hiring standards, job specifications, and interview playbooks.
•Integrated quality and testing approaches across different business units.
•Owned automation strategy and delivery across frontend and backend systems in a large-scale microservices, event-driven AWS environment.
•Owned tooling budget (circa £100k) and vendor relationships, including joint enablement and training initiatives.

Test Engineering Lead

Sep 2017 – Feb 2019

•Built testing as a function in a startup-style environment: hiring, team structure, embedded testers, environments, release process.
•Introduced automation (Selenium/Java via BrowserStack, RestAssured API tests in Bamboo CI).
•Enabled an 11× increase in release frequency by pushing incremental delivery and quality-first practices.

Test Manager (TV & Radio – Mobile)

Mar 2015 – Sep 2017

•Led up to 25 engineers delivering BBC iPlayer and BBC iPlayer Radio on iOS / Android, including contractors and permanent staff.
•Owned Test Strategy, shortening mobile regression from two weeks to two days via risk-based coverage, exploratory testing and pairing.
•Worked on BBC-wide initiatives: supplier selection, on-device automation, and Test Craftsmanship community.
•Actively involved in inclusive hiring and early-career schemes (Leonard Cheshire Change 100, Extend, Apprenticeships & Graduates).

Senior Test Engineer

Apr 2014 – Feb 2015

•Test Lead for BBC iPlayer mobile native applications on iOS and Android. Reorganised the existing team to fit into a lean, crew-based agile delivery model.
•In charge of planning and process improvement, including reducing the regression test spend from two weeks to two days by introducing test automation and the use of audience statistics to help drive a risk-based approach to device coverage.

BJSS

Senior Test Engineer

Jan 2014 - Apr 2014

Stagecoach

Senior QA Engineer

Jul 2013 - Dec 2013

Waters Corporation

Software Test Team Leader

Mar 2013 - Jul 2013

Waters Corporation

Software Test Engineer

Jan 2010 - Mar 2013

T-Mobile UK

Test Analyst

Sept 2007 - Jan 2010

Featured Work

This site

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I've added the code for this site to my public Github profile. I scaffolded it with OpenAI Codex, then did a fair bit of refactoring to make it more useable (eg adding tests, testids for testability, extracting navigation elements into components for reusability). Then set up AWS so it can run as a static site on S3 behind Cloudflare.

GenAITypeScriptPlaywrightAutomated Testing

Automation Challenge Platform

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Hands-on backend and frontend automation challenges (RestAssured) used for onboarding, upskilling and hiring. Includes failing tests to understand a candidate's approach to identifying test failues, using logs, and coding.

RestAssuredAutomated Testing

Job notifier

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Small project using AWS Lambda and SES to send email alerts when jobs are posted

AWSLambda

Skills & Focus Areas

Software Testing & Quality
GenAI in Test Engineering
GenAI Agents and Skills
Engineering Leadership
Strategic Programme Leadership
Engineering Tech Strategy
Automation Framework Design (Playwright, TestCafe, RestAssured)
Contract Testing (Pact)
DORA Metrics & Engineering Maturity
AWS

Qualifications

Architecting on AWS2021
Developing on AWS2021
Association for Project Management - APMP (IPMA Level D, SCQF Level 7)2012
ISTQB Foundation Certificate in Software Testing2007
BSc (Hons) Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne2007

Contact

Open to senior quality / test engineering leadership roles (Director / Head of Quality / Head of Test / Principal Quality Engineering Architect) and strategic consulting around quality transformation, test strategy, or developer experience.

For speaking, advisory, or collaboration queries, the best way to reach me is email.

Email me View GitHub