Senior Director of Software Quality Assurance

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Define and take ownership of the enterprise QA strategy and a multi-year quality roadmap across Appspace's product suite, which includes Digital Signage, Space Reservation, Visitor Management, and Intranet, ensuring alignment of quality investments with business and engineering priorities.

• Build, lead, mentor, and expand a globally distributed QA organization that encompasses manual, automation, and performance testing, collaborating through QA managers and leads across various time zones.

• Establish standards and strategies for test automation, selecting and governing frameworks (such as Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Appium, REST Assured/Postman) while driving coverage, stability, and maintainability across product domains.

• Direct the practice of performance and reliability testing, setting standards for load, stress, and scalability, and defining targets for latency, throughput, and error budgets for critical service boundaries.

• Own the quality gate strategy within CI/CD pipelines by defining the criteria for triggering automated tests, identifying release blockers, and determining how quality signals are communicated to engineering teams and leadership.

• Define the quality metrics and reporting framework, including defect escape rate, test coverage, automation ROI, release readiness, and trend-based regression detection, while providing executive leadership with clear and actionable quality insights.

• Advocate for a shift-left culture by partnering with product and engineering teams to integrate quality practices, test design, and risk assessment early in the development lifecycle.

• Propel the adoption of AI-augmented testing methodologies—such as test generation, self-healing automation, anomaly detection, and result analysis—within the AIDLC framework, including quality practices for AI-assisted and AI-generated code.

• Standardize test management, environments, and data strategies across teams (e.g., TestRail, Xray, Zephyr, Jira) to ensure traceability from requirements to outcomes.

• Manage the QA budget, oversee tooling investments, and maintain vendor relationships while making build-versus-buy decisions across the quality tooling landscape.

• Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional QA talent by establishing career frameworks, performance standards, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement across a global team.

• Communicate the quality strategy, risk assessments, and capability roadmaps to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders, influencing decisions without direct authority.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.

• 10–15 years of experience in software quality engineering, with a strong background in senior QA leadership roles managing other managers and leads.

• Proven experience leading QA teams that encompass manual, automation, and performance testing across a large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platform.

• Demonstrated ability to build and manage globally distributed QA teams across various time zones, including experience with offshore and hybrid delivery models.

• In-depth, hands-on understanding of the contemporary test automation ecosystem—Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Appium, and API testing tools (REST Assured, Postman)—with the insight to recommend the appropriate approach for specific contexts.

• Strong expertise in performance and reliability testing tools and practices (such as JMeter, k6, Gatling, Locust), along with the ability to define significant SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets.

• Experience incorporating quality gates into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps), featuring sophisticated pass/fail logic and trend-based regression detection.

• Solid grasp of modern software architecture—microservices, event-driven systems, APIs, and cloud-native platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure)—enabling comprehensive reasoning about quality and performance risks across the technology stack.

• Experience in defining and operationalizing quality metrics and KPIs, as well as reporting quality status to executive leadership.

• Working knowledge of test management and defect tracking tools (Jira, TestRail, Xray, Zephyr) and BDD practices (Cucumber, Gherkin).

• Practical familiarity with SQL, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and scripting in Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript to maintain credibility with engineering teams.

• Hands-on experience utilizing Generative AI tools (such as Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to enhance test design, automation authoring, or result analysis.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of producing clear strategy documents and executive-facing quality narratives.

• Proven ability to lead technical discussions, foster alignment across engineering teams, and influence design decisions without direct authority.

• Ability to effectively operate in a globally distributed team environment across various time zones.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• 401(k) plan

• Paid parental leave

• Generous PTO

• Flexible work schedules

• Remote work opportunities

• Paid company holidays

• Appspace Quiet Fridays (No non-essential internal meetings scheduled)

• A casual dress work environment