Director, Quality Assurance \u0026 External Custom

This is why you want to join AAMVA:

You'll lead an organization with a genuinely advanced, in-house engineering culture around testing, the runway to modernize it with AI, and the mandate to shape quality and customer support for systems that matter. If you're a technical quality leader who wants to build and transform - not just maintain - this is that role.
About the role
Lead a ~35-person organization spanning Quality Assurance and External Customer Support, through a team of quality assurance and support managers.

We are looking for a Director of Quality Assurance and External Customer Support to lead and elevate the quality of a portfolio of complex, integration-heavy data systems - and to own the technical support experience for the external partners who depend on them.

This is a leadership role for someone who pairs deep, current technical credibility with exceptional people leadership. Our platforms run on a cloud-native, microservices architecture on Azure, with REST interfaces across all internal and external integrations, and we invest heavily in AI-assisted test engineering. You will set the quality strategy for that future, build the team capable of delivering it, and ensure our external customers receive responsive, expert support backed by the people who know the systems best.

You will inherit a capable department with real strengths and meaningful room to advance its practices. A central part of this role is leading that organization through transformation - raising technical capability, developing the team and its leaders, and aligning everyone around modern, automation-first, AI-forward quality engineering over the next several years.

What you'll do
Quality strategy & transformation leadership

• Own the end-to-end quality strategy across all products and programs - functional, integration, performance, security, and data quality.
• Lead the organization through a multi-year modernization of its tools, practices, and skills toward automation-first, AI-assisted quality engineering.
• Set the technical direction the team will follow: testing approaches for microservices, REST/contract testing, distributed and asynchronous systems, and data validation.
• Define quality gates, release criteria, and governance that integrate cleanly with engineering and program delivery.

People & organizational leadership

• Lead through a management layer: coach, develop, and hold accountable the managers running QA and support functions; raise the bar on leadership across the org.
• Build, grow, and where needed restructure the team to match where the technology is headed - hiring, developing existing talent, and managing performance with fairness and clarity.
• Create career paths and skill-development programs that move the team toward modern engineering practices.

Technical direction & platform

• Champion an AI-forward test engineering approach, including AI-assisted generation of test plans and cases, accelerated debugging, and intelligent reporting.
• Guide test strategy for a microservices ecosystem on Azure (App Service Plans and AKS), including service isolation, contract testing, and integration validation across services and third parties.
• Ensure robust validation of data across modern data stores (e.g. Cosmos DB, Azure SQL) and across REST interfaces for all internal and external integrations.
• Drive measurable improvement in coverage, defect escape rate, automation ratio, and cycle time.

External customer support

• Own the support experience for external customers - government agencies, federal partners, and commercial/third-party data consumers who integrate with and rely on our systems.
• Lead technical and escalation support: incident management, issue triage and resolution, SLA definition and adherence, and partner integration support.
• Build a tight feedback loop between field issues and quality engineering, so what surfaces in support strengthens test coverage and product quality.
• Serve as a senior point of escalation for major external-facing incidents, leading root-cause and corrective-action processes.

Stakeholder leadership

• Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and Program leadership to manage risk and balance…