Systems Quality Engineering Lead

Position: People Systems Quality Engineering Lead
This role focuses on the bigger picture—ensuring that testing is tightly connected across systems, geographies, and employee populations. You will understand how data flows seamlessly from recruiting and onboarding through core HR, payroll, workforce management, benefits, reporting, and downstream systems, translating complex HR workflows into comprehensive, repeatable test scenarios.

Advantages
Strategic Leadership Scope:
Design and execute a comprehensive enterprise testing framework that directly impacts a large-scale, multi-stream HR technology portfolio.

Global & Cross-Regional Impact:
Lead test coordination across diverse populations including the United States, Canada, and impacted international locations.

High Operational Accountability:
Drive true business validation by holding distributed cross-functional business teams accountable for meaningful sign-offs rather than passive approvals.

Modern Systems Ecosystem:
Deepen your expertise across elite enterprise architectures, partnering with implementation vendors across systems like UKG, iCIMS, and specialized benefits or case management platforms.

Responsibilities
Enterprise Testing Framework

Build and coordinate a practical, repeatable enterprise testing framework across all People Systems workstreams.
Align platform-specific, module-level testing plans with broader end-to-end business process validation.
Define unified testing templates, evidence requirements, defect categories, and readiness checkpoints.
Create reusable test cases mapped precisely to the complete employee data lifecycle.
Identify and eliminate critical gaps between system-specific testing and real world operational needs.

UAT Leadership & Stakeholder Management

Lead business-led User Acceptance Testing (UAT) across all assigned People Systems portfolios.
Partner cross-functionally with HR, Payroll, Benefits, Talent Acquisition, Operations, Finance, Legal, IT, and regional teams.
Define explicit UAT owners, timelines, scope parameters, expected outcomes, and formal sign-off requirements.
Push business teams to fully test the modules, data configurations, and employee populations they operationally own.
Facilitate hands-on UAT working sessions, tester training programs, office hours, and defect triage reviews.
Track and report test completion, user participation, outstanding defects, retesting lifecycles, and overdue milestones.
Escalate operational gaps immediately where testing is found to be incomplete, delayed, or insufficient.

Employee Data Lifecycle & Regional Validation

Coordinate testing across key lifecycle scenarios, including requisition creation, candidate selection, onboarding, new hire setup, promotions, pay changes, leaves, and terminations.
Validate core security parameters, cross-system workflows, automated reporting outputs, and custom integrations.
Ensure testing incorporates regional variations across the United States, Canada, and international business units.
Validate country-specific differences in payroll-impacting data, compliance structures, benefits eligibility, and timekeeping rules.
Identify and mitigate risks where testing is overly focused on a single country, company, or employee group.

Defect Management & Data Validation

Coordinate defect tracking, ownership assignments, retesting workflows, and resolution cycles.
Track business impacts, regional disruptions, and overall go-live risks to support go/no-go readiness decisions.
Validate employee data, field mapping rules, data conversions, transformation logic, file outputs, and automated exception handling.
Confirm integration outputs for demographics, payroll data, benefit deductions, and time tracking entries to prevent post-go-live disruption.

Qualifications
Core Requirements

Experience:

Proven experience in quality engineering, QA, HR systems testing, business analysis, or enterprise application implementations.
Domain Mastery:
Strong HR and People Systems domain experience paired with a thorough understanding of the employee data lifecycle.
Testing Scope:
Experience testing HR, payroll, workforce management, benefits, talent acquisition, onboarding, or case management processes.
Deliverables Depth:
Demonstrated experience creating comprehensive test plans, scripts, UAT scenarios, defect logs, test evidence, and readiness reports.
Testing Types:
Competency across functional, integration, regression, UAT, and end-to-end business process testing methodologies.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

Professional experience with enterprise HR platforms like UKG, iCIMS, workforce management systems, or payroll software.
Experience supporting technology implementations, corporate mergers, acquisitions, system consolidations, or portfolio transformation programs.
Experience testing payroll-impacting configuration, complex timekeeping rules, benefits eligibility tiers, and carrier vendor file structures.
Proficiency with tracking and collaboration tools such as Jira, Azure Dev Ops, Smartsheet, Excel, or Service Now.
Background working directly…