Department: Research and Development

The Zonal group are one of the UK’s largest technology providers to the hospitality industry.
Our products are used by over 11,000 pubs, restaurants and hotels. Customers include national brands like Pizza Express, JD Wetherspoons and All Bar One.

We provide our customers with the solutions they need to make their business a success.
These solutions include mobile apps for ordering and web apps for engaging with consumers either through loyalty or reservations. By linking these solutions to Zonal’s EPoS (till) system, we help hospitality brands to understand their customers’ behaviour and preferences, enabling them to excel in an increasingly competitive market.

If you have booked a table or hotel room, ordered, and paid for food and drinks, received loyalty offers, or downloaded your favourite hang out’s app, you will likely have used a Zonal product.

We are a family business with Scottish roots. We operate from our modern head office in Edinburgh to our Marketing Technologies Division in Staffordshire, or our Innovation Centre in Abingdon and hotel management solutions base in Cardiff.

What you’ll do

You will be working in the iOrder team, who look after the engine that drives the integrations, apps, and websites used to order & pay at tables by many hospitality venues across the UK. You will help to modernise the hospitality industry by working on the latest features and improvements for these applications. You will feel a sense of pride when you see the work you do having a direct positive impact in this industry.

Your day will be split between preparing tests for upcoming development, peer reviews, work estimation, execution, and involvement in continuous improvement.

Working within an agile delivery team, you will participate in all aspects of delivering software projects. You will participate in the product design, technical design, development, and maintenance of our environments. You will ensure quality by driving test automation and exploration, performing reviews, and influencing behaviour-driven design.

Responsibilities will involve:-

• Generating functional, system and regression test cases and procedures within agreed timescales
• Test execution at integration and system test levels
• Adding acceptance tests to our existing Test Automation framework
• Attending review meetings at different stages during the development process with the aim of influencing stakeholders, reporting and facilitating overall system quality
• Partake in review sessions including code reviews and three amigos
• Creating and maintaining test data and environment permutations
• Effectively logging, monitoring and retesting all defects found during testing
• Escalating any issues likely to affect the project scope or timescales
• Having a positive impact on the quality of our products
• Build up our test coverage as our CI/CD pipeline scales to support our ever-growing product integrations
• Help ensure your vertical’s releases adhere to deadlines while not compromising on quality.

Who you are

You will enjoy a fast-paced development environment where the next test execution phase is only around the corner. You will care about continuous improvement and modernising our test approaches. Automation is important to you and you will want to ensure quality through the best tools and coverage. You will have extensive experience in software testing and are able to switch from preparation, design, manual, exploratory, and automated testing on any given day.

• Extensive test experience on both Web and Mobile platforms
• Experience of creating automated test suites, adding tests and maintaining these tests
• Database proficiency (SQL Server) or other RDBS
• Agile (SDLC) experience
• Experience using MsTest, Nunit or similar test framework
• Suggesting and driving improvements within our QA processes.
• Understand and respond to customer needs (internal and external) and exceed expectations where possible. You are willing to go the extra mile to get the job done.
• Work co-operatively with others to achieve a common goal, suggesting better solutions diplomatically to achieve it.
• You are confident in your ability as a Senior Tester and can work independently without continuous instruction
• Excellent problem-solving skills to analyse information appropriately and find best solutions taking a balanced view to reach logical conclusions and make relevant decisions
• Organisational skills to establish efficient and appropriate plans for self and others and adapt quickly and effectively to unexpected changes whilst still ensuring objectives are met
• Flexible/agile in test efforts across multiple work streams whilst reporting efficiently
• Ability to be commercially and organisationally focused on the overall business and issues facing company
• Knowledge of Microsoft operating systems
• ISEB/ISTQB Foundation Certificate

You will have an interest in and may be able to demonstrate experience in:

• Strong experience with a programming language, preferably C#
• Automation experience with Selenium or equivalent tool
• BDD and TDD
• Automation experience with Specflow
• Performance / Load testing

What we value

Passion, Teamwork, Innovation and Professionalism are the values we believe make us the company we are. We’re looking for someone who understands great culture and will help us shape it as it evolves.

The Zonal group are one of the UK’s largest technology providers to the hospitality industry.Our products are used by over 16,000 pubs, restaurants and hotels. Customers include national brands like Pizza Express, JD Wetherspoons and All Bar One.

We provide our customers with the solutions they need to make their business a success. These solutions include mobile apps for ordering and web apps for engaging with consumers either through loyalty or reservations. By linking these solutions to Zonal’s EPoS (till) system, we help hospitality brands to understand their customers’ behaviour and preferences, enabling them to excel in an increasingly competitive market.

If you have booked a table or hotel room, ordered, and paid for food and drinks, received loyalty offers, or downloaded your favourite hang out’s app, you will likely have used a Zonal product.

We are a family business with Scottish roots. We operate from our modern head office in Edinburgh to our Marketing Technologies Division in Staffordshire, or our Innovation Centre in Abingdon and hotel management solutions base in Cardiff.

What you’ll do

You will be working in the iOrder team, who look after the engine that drives the integrations, apps, and websites used to order & pay at tables by many hospitality venues across the UK. You will help to modernise the hospitality industry by working on the latest features and improvements for these applications. You will feel a sense of pride when you see the work you do having a direct positive impact in this industry.

Your day will be split between preparing tests for upcoming development, peer reviews, work estimation, execution, and involvement in continuous improvement.

Working within an agile delivery team, you will participate in all aspects of delivering software projects. You will participate in the product design, technical design, development, and maintenance of our environments. You will ensure quality by driving test automation and exploration, performing reviews, and influencing behaviour-driven design.

Responsibilities will involve:-

• Generating functional, system and regression test cases and procedures within agreed timescales
• Test execution at integration and system test levels
• Adding acceptance tests to our existing Test Automation framework
• Attending review meetings at different stages during the development process with the aim of influencing stakeholders, reporting and facilitating overall system quality
• Partake in review sessions including code reviews and three amigos
• Creating and maintaining test data and environment permutations
• Effectively logging, monitoring and retesting all defects found during testing
• Escalating any issues likely to affect the project scope or timescales
• Having a positive impact on the quality of our products
• Build up our test coverage as our CI/CD pipeline scales to support our ever-growing product integrations
• Help ensure your vertical’s releases adhere to deadlines while not compromising on quality.

Who you are

You will enjoy a fast-paced development environment where the next test execution phase is only around the corner. You will care about continuous improvement and modernising our test approaches. Automation is important to you and you will want to ensure quality through the best tools and coverage. You will have experience in software testing and are able to switch from preparation, design, manual, exploratory, and automated testing on any given day.

• Test experience on both Web and Mobile platforms
• Experience of adding tests to automated test suites, and maintaining these tests
• Database proficiency (SQL Server) or other RDBS
• Agile (SDLC) experience
• Experience using MsTest, Nunit or similar test framework
• Confident in your ability to suggest and drive improvements within our QA processes.
• Understand and respond to customer needs (internal and external) and exceed expectations where possible. You are willing to go the extra mile to get the job done.
• Work co-operatively with others to achieve a common goal, suggesting better solutions diplomatically to achieve it.
• You are confident in your ability as a Tester and can work independently without continuous instruction
• Excellent problem-solving skills to analyse information appropriately and find best solutions taking a balanced view to reach logical conclusions and make relevant decisions
• Organisational skills to establish efficient and appropriate plans for self and others and adapt quickly and effectively to unexpected changes whilst still ensuring objectives are met
• Flexible/agile in test efforts across multiple work streams whilst reporting efficiently
• Ability to be commercially and organisationally focused on the overall business and issues facing company
• Knowledge of Microsoft operating systems
• ISEB/ISTQB Foundation Certificate

You will have an interest in and may be able to demonstrate experience in:

• Experience with a programming language, preferably C#
• Automation experience with Selenium or equivalent tool
• BDD and TDD
• Automation experience with Specflow
• Performance / Load testing

What we value

Passion, Teamwork, Innovation and Professionalism are the values we believe make us the company we are. We’re looking for someone who understands great culture and will help us shape it as it evolves.

The Zonal group are one of the UK’s largest technology providers to the hospitality industry. Our products are used by over 11,000 pubs, restaurants and hotels. Customers include national brands like Pizza Express, JD Wetherspoons and All Bar One.

We provide our customers with the solutions they need to make their business a success. These solutions include mobile apps for ordering and web apps for engaging with consumers either through loyalty or reservations. By linking these solutions to Zonal’s EPoS (till) system, we help hospitality brands to understand their customers’ behaviour and preferences, enabling them to excel in an increasingly competitive market.

If you have booked a table or hotel room, ordered, and paid for food and drinks, received loyalty offers, or downloaded your favourite hang out’s app, you will likely have used a Zonal product.

We are a family business with Scottish roots. We operate from our modern head office in Edinburgh to our Marketing Technologies Division in Staffordshire, or our Innovation Centre in Abingdon and hotel management solutions base in Cardiff.

What you’ll do

You will be lead the iOrder team, who look after the engine that drives the integrations, apps, and websites used to order & pay at tables by many hospitality venues across the UK. You and your team will help to modernise the hospitality industry by working on the latest features and improvements for these applications. You will be a key member of a cross domain group of leaders that govern the effective delivery of our software solutions.

You and your teams will operate with a large degree of autonomy, with choices about process and technology stack. You will be responsible for ensuring your teams remain aligned with the overall technology and product strategies and processes striking the right balance between consistency and flexibility.

You will be responsible for enabling the commercial success of your products, which includes both the operations of the product (uptime, performance, and user experience) and the successful delivery of the product roadmaps (features).

It will be your responsibility to co-ordinate the cycle, release, and sprint planning activities of your teams in co-ordination with the Product Management teams. You will be responsible for ensuring the teams are effectively delivering against plans through an effective and structured monitoring and reporting framework.

You will keep a strategic view of the demands on, and limitations to, the products and use this to constantly improve the operations of the product.

• Through your teams you will continually deliver products, or projects, using the appropriate agile project management methodology
• It will be your role to make sure the team is performing to its optimum capability while maintaining good practice and achieving a high level of quality and low team turnover. You will own the continual improvement plan for the team.
• Lead the collaborative, dynamic planning process across all your teams – prioritising the work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team within each Planning Cycle. This will include both technical and non-technical backlogs.
• Continually report on progress of planning cycles using appropriate Agile KPIs such as Release Burndown charts, Cumulative Flow and Lead Time analysis feeding this information into continual improvement plans for the team.
• Manage dependencies both within and across domain areas of our Product Suite where requirements being implemented “cross boundaries” between individual product areas.
• Ensure Architects and Tech Leads effectively shape requirements to the right level to enable the team to be clear on and architectural and technical considerations.
• Facilitate the inclusion of wider Zonal stakeholder requirements into the technical backlogs with your teams, for example Zonal Security and Zonal Technical Services.
• You will enable and foster a culture of innovation and professionalism within the team where there is clear ownership and accountability, and where individuals take pride in their deliverables and creating a positive customer impact.
• As a Line Manager you will recruit, develop, coach, motivate and performance manage those in your team especially with regards pragmatic and effective implementation of Agile Methodologies.
• We would like you to actively participate in the Product Delivery community, sharing and re-applying skills and knowledge and bringing in best practice.
• You will work with your teams and the Product Management function to help define the sprint roadmaps ensuring that delivery timescales are achievable, realistic, and commercially viable.
• Ensure your teams can provide the necessary support, in and out of hours, to our customers. Drive improvements in this support.
• You will be expected build a technology function where teams and products are loosely coupled but tightly aligned: We don’t want tight dependencies between products as that makes delivery more complicated, but we do need all products improving the overall solution and heading in the same direction
• Given your expertise we will ask you to ensure a balance between consistency and flexibility: teams need freedom when it comes to process and technology choices, but when appropriate it must be consistent between teams.

Who you are

You will have a background working in a software Product Delivery environment, most likely you will have spent some of career as a contributing member of a delivery team. You will have experience of managing and leading groups of people successfully to deliver on defined outcomes.

We want you and your leadership skills on-board; you’ll be the go-to person to help get things done.
It goes without saying you will have an in-depth and thorough understanding of agile principles and techniques.

• As a natural, confident, and clear communicator you will have experience liaising with technical and non-technical teams and across organisational boundaries.
• You will bring exception organisational skills to bear along with previous experience of line managing to deliver through others.
• You will be experienced in communicating with support staff, delivery team members and C-Level executives and know how to tailor your communications to the audience.
• You will be motivated by getting things done, and getting them done in the right way, first time; you are laser focussed on achieving the best outcome.
• As a valued Manager within the business, we would like to be aware of the business and commercial pressures relevant to your teams, your dynamic leadership skills will pragmatically balance delivery against the pressure – you realise that we don’t always operate in a perfect world and it will be necessary for you to make difficult decisions from time to time.
• You will have experience of rapid business changes and be able to keep your team motivated, energised and on track through these periods.
• Using your communication skills, you will keep key stakeholders aware of progress against plans and help mitigate risks. You will understand that the identification of risks and issues is not enough – when escalating you will provide recommendations and solutions.
• Being accountable for delivery of multiple projects and those factors which make delivery successful or unsuccessful, you will use this knowledge to ensure positive outcome and build a track record of delivering software releases on time and within budget
• Ability to work closely with other key functions which may include Product Management, Infrastructure teams, DevOps team to enable delivery.
• Have a proven track record of successful delivery through agile development teams and a clear understanding of Agile principles and techniques

What we value

Passion, Teamwork, Innovation and Professionalism are the values we believe make us the company we are. We’re looking for someone who understands great culture and will help us shape it as it evolves.