Director, Software Quality Enablement & Developer Productivity

Director, Software Quality Enablement & Developer Productivity

The Director, Software Quality Enablement & Developer Productivity is an engineering transformation leader responsible for evolving quality from a traditional testing function into an integrated engineering capability. Rather than measuring success by automation coverage or the number of test cases executed, this role will improve engineering effectiveness by building quality into software architecture, development, and deployment from the beginning.

This leader will partner closely with Software Engineering, Architecture, Platform Engineering, Dev Ops, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Security, Product, and UX teams to improve testability, observability, reliability, deployment confidence, and developer productivity across Walgreens Digital.

The ideal candidate is first and foremost a software engineering leader who has successfully built or transformed engineering quality organizations. Candidates should have a strong software engineering foundation, with experience in areas such as backend development, distributed systems, APIs, middleware, cloud platforms, infrastructure, or software architecture before moving into quality engineering leadership.

This leader will establish modern engineering practices, including developer-owned quality, API-first validation, contract testing, service virtualization, CI/CD quality gates, continuous testing, and engineering observability. They will also help define how AI can transform software engineering through AI-assisted development, intelligent quality engineering, improved developer productivity, and defect prevention.

LOCATION This position is based in Deerfield, Illinois, and follows a hybrid schedule of four days in the office and one remote day each week. This position is not eligible for visa sponsorship.

• Lead a high-performing Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) organization focused on engineering enablement rather than downstream testing.

• Define and execute Walgreens' engineering quality strategy in alignment with enterprise software modernization and cloud transformation initiatives.

• Establish the operating model for how SDETs partner with engineering teams to build quality into software rather than inspect quality after development.

• Build organizational capability through the hiring, coaching, mentoring, and succession planning of highly technical SDETs.

• Influence software architecture and engineering design decisions to improve testability, reliability, observability, resilience, and long-term maintainability.

• Lead engineering design reviews with a focus on APIs, service boundaries, dependency management, failure modes, and quality-by-design principles.

• Establish engineering standards for developer-owned quality, unit testing, API-first testing, contract testing, integration testing, and production readiness.

• Reduce reliance on end-to-end UI automation by improving engineering practices, system testability, and intelligent automation strategies.

• Lead root-cause analyses of escaped defects and drive systemic improvements that prevent recurrence.

• Build and maintain scalable engineering quality platforms, frameworks, and tools that improve developer productivity.

• Ensure automation frameworks are treated as production-quality software, with strong engineering standards for maintainability, versioning, performance, and reuse.

• Partner with Platform Engineering and Dev Ops to integrate quality gates, automated validation, and continuous testing into CI/CD pipelines.

• Establish engineering practices for test data management, environment strategy, service virtualization, and deployment confidence.

• Define and drive the adoption of AI-assisted software engineering practices throughout the software development lifecycle.

• Evaluate emerging AI technologies for code generation, automated testing, code review, defect prevention, engineering productivity, and software delivery.

• Help evolve the role of Quality Engineering as AI changes how software is designed, developed,…