Quality Engineer

Senior Quality Engineering Leader

Payrate: $55.00 - $60.00/hr summary:
The role is a senior individual contributor responsible for driving transformational quality engineering outcomes across product, engineering, release, and operations teams. This position requires a unique blend of technical depth, systems thinking, organizational influence, and relentless curiosity. The individual will lead complex initiatives spanning quality engineering, test architecture, release readiness, environment strategy, AI-enabled engineering practices, and software delivery governance. Success in this role is measured by business outcomes, not activity metrics.

The ideal candidate can take an ambiguous problem, define a strategy, align stakeholders, and drive execution with minimal oversight. This role does not have direct people management responsibilities but is expected to operate at a leadership level through influence, coaching, and technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead initiatives that span multiple engineering teams and organizational boundaries.
• Translate broad business objectives into actionable roadmaps.
• Identify systemic causes behind recurring quality, release, or operational challenges.
• Drive sustainable solutions rather than temporary fixes.
• Define quality engineering strategies, standards, and architectures.
• Guide teams on test strategy, automation, release quality, observability, test environments, and risk management.
• Review designs, frameworks, and implementation approaches.
• Influence architecture decisions through a quality and reliability lens.
• Identify and implement opportunities to leverage AI across the software development lifecycle.
• Evaluate emerging AI capabilities and determine practical applications.
• Improve engineering productivity, test effectiveness, and delivery speed through AI-assisted workflows.
• Promote responsible and measurable AI adoption.
• Investigate complex technology, process, and organizational issues.
• Challenge assumptions and drive root-cause analysis.
• Build consensus among diverse stakeholders.
• Create clarity where none exists.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Architecture, SRE, Release Management, and Quality Engineering leaders.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads.
• Lead through influence rather than authority.
• Elevate engineering practices across the organization.

Qualifications

• 10 years in software engineering, quality engineering, platform engineering, or related technical disciplines.
• Experience leading large-scale technical initiatives without direct authority.
• Strong understanding of modern software delivery practices and distributed systems.
• Experience defining test strategies across multiple test levels.
• Deep understanding of automation frameworks and CI/CD practices.
• Knowledge of release quality, risk assessment, defect prevention, and production readiness.
• Demonstrated experience applying AI tools to engineering workflows.
• Ability to evaluate AI opportunities beyond simple code generation.
• Understanding of strengths, limitations, risks, and governance considerations associated with AI-assisted engineering.
• Must be able to review code effectively, review automation frameworks and technical designs, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and guide engineering teams without becoming the primary implementer.

Skills

• Technical depth and systems thinking.
• Organizational influence and leadership through coaching and technical leadership.
• Relentless curiosity and ability to solve ambiguous problems.
• Ability to drive transformational quality engineering outcomes.