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.

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, automated testing practices across organisations.

I've created this site to showcase my work, link of to some projects I've worked on (including this site), and maybe start a blog one day.

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.

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

Experience

Principal Test Engineer

Feb 2021 – Present

•Part of the central Enterprise Architecture team at Booking.com, responsible for leading on improving the developer experience and quality practices across the business, and giving technical leadership across the software engineering lifecycle.
•Co-authored and implemented company-wide Quality Strategy, reducing Change Failure Rate by >55%.
•Led Developer Experience guiding principal across all business units, with >80% adoption and >10% improvement in engineering maturity.
•Delivered resources such as a comprehensive Quality knowledge base, Sonarqube quality profiles and templating, and refreshed evaluation metrics based on DORA.
•Key collaborator on the company-wide Quality Strategy and leader of its rollout workstream, including GenAI guidance for test case and test data generation, SonarQube quality profiles, and refreshed DORA-based metrics.
•Led DMA compliance testing and rollout: daily release plans, company-wide fire drills, production monitoring and fast remediation to deliver on-time against EU regulatory deadlines.
•Drove adoption of unit and contract testing via a train-the-trainer model: unit test adoption 29% → 93%, contract testing 29% → 50%, elevating code releasability from E → B in 9 months.
•Mentored Principal / Senior Test Engineers and Engineering Managers in Test; built cross-business-unit collaboration and career progression pathways.

Senior Engineering Manager – Test

Feb 2019 – Feb 2021

•Led Engineering Managers in Test across Manchester, London, and Amsterdam (organisation size ~40 including indirect reports).
•Built working practices between UK-based Transport and Netherlands-based Accommodation units for the first time, improving cross-functional integration.
•Created learning paths, competencies and training materials for automation, web, and native app quality practices.
•Scaled frontend and backend automation frameworks around AWS-native microservices and event-driven systems (CloudWatch, Kinesis, DynamoDB).

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

Skills & Focus Areas

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