Title : Head of Quality Assurance

Function : Engineering Quality Engineering

Reports to : CTO / VP Engineering & Product Development

Direct reports : 8+ QA and automation engineers, embedded across product squads

Experience : 10+ years in software quality, including 4+ years leading QA teams

The role :

We are hiring a Head of Quality Assurance to own quality across everything Delta6Labs ships. You will lead an established QA organisation of 15+ engineers embedded across product squads, and you will report directly to the CTO / VP Engineering & Product Development as part of the engineering leadership team.

Qualification :

B.E. / B.Tech / M.C.A. in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline. Equivalent practical experience considered.

What you will own :

Quality strategy and accountability :

- Own the end-to-end quality strategy for all Delta6Labs platforms - exchanges, wallets, trading systems, and white-label deployments and translate it into a roadmap with clear quarterly outcomes.

- Define and enforce release-readiness criteria, entry and exit gates, and go/no-go authority. Be the person accountable for saying not yet and for making that call defensible with evidence.

- Establish a risk-based test strategy that concentrates effort where financial, regulatory and reputational exposure is highest, rather than spreading coverage evenly and thinly.

- Partner with Product, Engineering, DevSecOps and Security so quality is designed in from requirements through to production monitoring.

Test automation and quality engineering :

- Own the design and evolution of our automation frameworks across API, service, integration, data and UI layers, with a deliberate bias toward API and contract-level coverage.

- Drive automated regression suites into CI/CD so that every merge and every release candidate is gated on evidence, not opinion.

- Build and own performance, load, soak and stress testing for high-throughput, low-latency paths, order matching, market-data streams, settlement batches and webhook fan-out.

- Establish contract testing between services, service virtualisation for third-party dependencies (custody, KYC/AML, blockchain analytics, market data), and dependable test-data management across environments.

- Drive data-integrity and reconciliation testing across ledgers, balances, fee calculations and transaction histories, down to database level.

- Partner with Security and DevSecOps on security regression, dependency and configuration checks.

- Champion shift-left practices : testability reviews at design time, unit and integration coverage standards, static analysis, feature flags, and safe progressive rollout.

Team leadership and development :

- Lead, coach and grow a QA organisation of 8+ engineers; set clear ownership boundaries between squad-embedded QA and a central quality-engineering function.

- Own hiring end to end define the bar, build the interview loop, and recruit manual, automation and SDET talent in a competitive Delhi NCR market.

- Define career ladders, competency frameworks, goal setting and performance reviews for the QA function; create a real path that converts strong manual testers into automation engineers.

- Build a culture of engineering rigour and psychological safety, where defects are data, blameless root-cause analysis is routine, and escalation is expected rather than penalised.

- Act as the senior quality voice with clients and stakeholders in delivery reviews, pre-sales technical conversations, and audit or security-review requests for quality evidence.

Process, metrics and continuous improvement :

- Define the defect lifecycle, severity and priority taxonomy, triage cadence and response SLAs and hold the whole engineering organisation to them.

- Instrument quality and report it on a fixed cadence : escaped-defect rate, defect density, automation coverage and stability, flake rate, mean time to detect and recover, regression cycle time, and release-failure rate.

- Run structured root-cause analysis on production incidents and close every loop with permanent test coverage.

- Rationalise tooling, environments and test infrastructure against cost and value, including provisioning, device and browser farms, and licensing.

- Maintain the traceability and documentation trail that our ISO obligations, client audits and security reviews depend on.

What you must bring :

- 10+ years in software quality assurance, including 4+ years leading QA teams, with direct experience managing a team of eight or more engineers.

- Demonstrated ownership of quality for a production financial, payments, trading or otherwise high-transaction-volume platform.

- Deep, hands-on API and backend testing expertise : REST and WebSocket, authentication and authorisation flows, pagination and rate limiting, idempotency, error contracts, and database-level validation with confident SQL.

- A real automation engineering background you have built or substantially rebuilt a framework yourself, not only sponsored one. Strong in at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or Java, with tools such as pytest, Playwright, REST Assured, Postman/Newman or equivalents.

- Proven ownership of performance and load testing using k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust or similar including interpreting results and driving fixes alongside engineers.

- Experience testing microservices and event-driven systems, including Kafka or RabbitMQ-style messaging.

- A track record of hiring, mentoring and retaining QA engineers, with specific people whose growth you can point to.

- Excellent written and verbal communication, able to hold a technical position with senior engineers and to explain risk plainly to non-technical stakeholders and clients.

Nice to have :

- Direct experience with cryptocurrency exchanges, digital-asset custody or trading systems, order books, matching engines, market data, liquidity and settlement.

- Familiarity with custody and wallet infrastructure (for example Fireblocks), KYC/AML vendors (SumSub, Veriff) and blockchain analytics (Chainalysis).

- Exposure to blockchain and smart-contract testing concepts, testnets, and coordinating external audits.

- Experience in a multi-tenant or white-label delivery model with client-specific configuration and parallel release trains.

- Working knowledge of security testing fundamentals and fintech-relevant standards OWASP, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001.

- Prior experience in an organisation delivering both product and client services, where quality is contractually visible.

- Relevant certifications (ISTQB Advanced Level, CSTE) welcome, though never a substitute for demonstrated work.