Director of Quality Assurance

Position Summary:

The Director of Quality Assurance will lead the strategy, execution, and continuous improvement of the Quality Assurance function within the Technology organization. This role is responsible for modernizing quality practices, strengthening release validation, advancing test automation, and ensuring quality is embedded throughout the Software Development Lifecycle.

This is a hands-on leadership role. The successful candidate must be able to operate at both strategic and technical levels, setting direction for QA and Quality Engineering while also reviewing, validating, and contributing to automation strategy, CI/CD quality controls, data validation, and release-readiness practices.

This leader will partner closely with Engineering, Dev Ops, Architecture, Product, Business, and Operations teams to improve software quality, reduce production risk, and create a culture of shared quality ownership.

Responsibilities:

* Quality Strategy & Leadership

* Plan, direct, and continuously improve QA policies, programs, standards, and initiatives.

* Define and lead the overall quality strategy across applications, services, platforms, and business-critical technology initiatives.

* Lead, mentor, and develop high-performing QA and Quality Engineering teams.

* Foster a culture of quality ownership, accountability, automation, measurable outcomes, and continuous improvement.

* Partner with Engineering, Dev Ops, Architecture, Product, Business, and Operations stakeholders to align quality objectives with organizational goals.

* Communicate quality risks, release readiness, and mitigation recommendations clearly to technical and executive stakeholders.

* Perform other duties and projects as assigned.

* SDLC Quality Integration & Governance

* Define and enforce QA standards across the full Software Development Lifecycle, including requirements, design, development, build, release, and production readiness.

* Ensure QA practices are embedded throughout delivery rather than limited to end-of-cycle testing.

* Establish traceability between requirements, test cases, defects, releases, deployment activity, and production outcomes.

* Define risk-based testing strategies that focus quality efforts on areas of highest business, operational, customer, and regulatory impact.

* Provide evidence-based release-readiness recommendations using defined quality criteria, test outcomes, risk indicators, and production-readiness signals.

* Drive consistent quality practices across teams while balancing governance with engineering autonomy.

* Test Automation & Quality Engineering

* Drive an automation-first testing strategy across applications, APIs, services, and platforms.

* Define standards for API, service-level, event-driven, and end-to-end validation, ensuring business workflows are validated beyond the user interface layer.

* Ensure automated tests are integrated into CI/CD pipelines and actively contribute to building, deployment, and release decision-making.

* Establish measurable quality thresholds, coverage expectations, and release criteria.

* Ensure testing frameworks are scalable, maintainable, and aligned with modern engineering practices.

* Evaluate and recommend testing, automation, and quality management tools that improve efficiency and effectiveness.

* Data Validation & System Integrity

* Define and enforce strategies for validating data integrity across applications, services, databases, and third-party integrations.

* Ensure QA processes include validation of complex data flows and consistency across systems.

* Establish standards for database testing, API validation, and reconciliation testing.

* Develop and oversee test data management strategies, including test data creation, masking, provisioning, maintenance, and governance.

* Ensure quality practices support regulatory, compliance, audit, and customer data protection requirements.

* Ensure defects are classified based on technical severity, enabling clear separation between technical impact and business prioritization.

* Observability, Reliability & Production Quality

* Partner with Engineering, Dev Ops, and Platform teams to use logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and telemetry to validate application behavior and improve testing effectiveness.

* Ensure distributed, service-oriented, and integrated architectures are validated as part of standard QA practice.

* Use production telemetry, incident patterns, defect trends, and operational insights to identify quality gaps and improve test coverage.

* Establish practices for resiliency, fault tolerance, recovery, business continuity, and production-readiness testing.

* Support defect investigation, root cause analysis, production validation, and continuous improvement through release and deployment traceability.

* Organizational & Technical Leadership

* Influence engineering teams toward greater ownership of software quality.

* Collaborate with Dev Ops and Platform Engineering teams to ensure quality controls are consistently enforced through…