Steven Burton.

The route so far

Where I’ve worked

A steady widening of scope: tester, quality leader, engineering leader, technology director. Every step earned in delivery, not conferred by a job title. This is where each one happened.

Steven Burton · Leeds, UK · stevenburton.tech · linkedin.com/in/steven-burton

Oct 2025 – now

Leeds

CDS

Director of Technology & Strategy

CDS advises, builds, protects and runs critical digital services — for government, policing, regulators, and national-scale private organisations. The work matters, and the cost of getting it wrong is high.

  • Leading technology and strategy across the consultancy: engineering strategy, the shape of our services, and how we deliver.
  • Growing the technical team and the standards it works to.

Jun 2022 – Oct 2025

Leeds

Burendo

Principal Managing Consultant → Head of Delivery → Head of Services & Engineering

Joined a fast-growing Leeds consultancy as its most senior consultant; left three years later running services and engineering on the senior leadership team.

  • Defined the service catalogue from scratch — more than 30 services describing what the company offers and how it delivers them.
  • Overall delivery accountability for a portfolio of clients with more than 50 consultants, keeping client satisfaction and staff retention consistently high.
  • Led winning bids, including a place on a heavily contested national health framework and the largest contract in the company’s history.
  • Wrote the competency framework and career paths used across the consultancy.
  • Grew the engineering practice year on year, and represented the company at events and conferences.

Nov 2021 – Jun 2022

Leeds

Accenture

Managing Consultant

Arrived through Accenture’s acquisition of Infinity Works, carrying on the account leadership work at a much larger scale.

  • Owned a portfolio of client accounts end to end — commercially, operationally, and for the people on them.
  • Part of the senior management team running the Leeds office.

Aug 2017 – Nov 2021

Leeds

Infinity Works

Senior Consultant → Principal Consultant → Account Lead

Consultancy life proper: years of client work across industries, tech stacks and roles — tester, tech lead, delivery lead, DevOps engineer — whatever the engagement needed.

  • Account lead for the Department for Work and Pensions and Asda — building the Asda Rewards delivery organisation from a standing start to three teams of more than twenty people, and leading a large-scale DWP data programme through to handover.
  • Technical and delivery leadership at Hermes and others: test strategy, contract testing, continuous delivery pipelines, and cloud engineering on AWS.
  • Re-energised the testing community of practice, led test recruitment, and helped run Ministry of Testing Leeds.

Jan 2009 – Aug 2017

Leeds

EMIS

Technical Tester → Senior Technical Tester → Automation Manager → Infrastructure & Tools Manager → Principal Software Engineer in Test

Where the habits were formed: eight and a half years testing healthcare software used across UK general practice — systems where defects reach real patients.

  • Built the department’s UI automation framework, still in use years after I moved on.
  • Led three teams — test environments, automation, and business intelligence — through the shift to agile ways of working, acting as product owner for each.
  • Led recruitment across the development department.

Alongside the day jobs

I co-organised Ministry of Testing Leeds for three years, wrote for Ministry of Testing and TEST Magazine — see published articles — and have spoken at conferences in the UK and abroad. Before any of it: a Computer Science degree at the University of Brighton, then a year travelling around the world, self-funded by working sixty-hour weeks for the twelve months before.

Working with me

If this looks like the kind of judgement you need — a technology decision, an engineering organisation, a delivery that isn’t working — the best place to reach me is LinkedIn.