Senior Director, Software Development, Test Automation

Senior Director, Software Development, Test Automation Systems

We’re hiring a Senior Director, Software Development, Test Automation Systems to architect and build Lila’s test automation platform and quality engineering practice for our AI‑powered scientific and lab automation products. Reporting to the VP of Engineering, you’ll own the test automation system, CI/CD test infrastructure, AI‑driven test tooling, and the eval discipline that holds the bar across our SDLC. This is a builder‑leader role where you drive quality vision, write requirements, make build‑vs‑buy decisions, drive execution, and lead a small (3–5 person) team that delivers leverage.

The operating model is federated: platform, standards, and metrics are your domain; engineering teams own test execution. You scale through tooling and influence. As you scale into this role, you’ll also stand up the QC framework for our lab automation system—validation patterns, harnesses, and contracts that science operations teams operate day‑to‑day. Data integrity and ALCOA+ compliance are foundational to everything you build.

• Design and build the test automation platform—frameworks, fixtures, golden datasets, test orchestration, and reporting—that the engineering org adopts by default
• Set standards across unit, integration, contract, end‑to‑end, regression, performance, and chaos testing for backend services, the frontend monorepo, and data pipelines
• Treat platform adoption, flake rate, and time‑to‑signal as first‑class engineering metrics

• Own the buy/build/borrow strategy across test infrastructure, eval platforms, browser/device clouds, observability, and lab QC tooling
• Justify every choice with TCO, signal quality, integration cost, and time‑to‑leverage—and revisit decisions as the org and tech landscape evolve
• Bias toward leverage: buy commodity capabilities, build differentiators (Lila‑specific AI evals, lab QC, scientific data integrity)

• Own the test execution layer of CI/CD: parallelization, caching, hermetic environments, ephemerally preview environments, and affected‑only test selection across our Nx monorepo/microservices
• Build retry, quarantine, and impact‑analysis systems so signal stays sharp as the org scales
• Drive change‑failure rate, MTTR, test effectiveness, pipeline efficiency, coverage, and PR‑to‑prod lead time as outcomes

• Apply LLMs across the full test lifecycle: test generation from specs and PRs, self‑healing UI tests, synthesis, visual regression with vision models, and AI‑assisted failure triage
• Validate every AI‑generated test through evals—no LLM‑authored test ships without proof it doesn’t degrade signal
• Establish the eval discipline for Lila’s AI/agent stack: golden datasets, rubrics, regression suites, offline + online evaluation pipelines

• Define quality SLOs and adoption metrics by team and service: coverage, escape rate, MTTR, change‑failure rate, eval pass rate, lab QC violation rate
• Build dashboards that make quality visible from PR to executive review
• Apply Google SRE practices to prioritize where investment goes

• Design the validation framework, harnesses, and contracts that lab and Science Ops teams will operate
• Embed ALCOA+ principles: data integrity, audit trails, lineage from sample → instrument → output
• Partner with Research Ops on pre‑flight, in‑flight, and post‑flight validation patterns for autonomous lab execution

• Build a 3–5 person team of test automation engineers focused on platform…