Quality & Release Lead

Role : Quality & Release Lead

Employment Type : Contractual

Job Summary :

We are looking for a Quality & Release Lead to drive software quality assurance, test strategy, release governance and deployment readiness across enterprise applications.

The role focuses on establishing quality standards, managing testing activities, coordinating release cycles and ensuring that software releases meet functional, technical and business requirements.

Key Responsibilities :

- Define and implement quality assurance strategies, testing standards and release governance processes.

- Lead end-to-end testing activities, including functional, integration, regression, system and user acceptance testing.

- Establish release readiness criteria and ensure all quality checkpoints are completed before production deployment.

- Coordinate release planning, scheduling, validation and deployment activities across engineering and business teams.

- Manage defect tracking, prioritization, resolution and closure throughout the software development lifecycle.

- Monitor test execution progress, defect trends, test coverage and overall product quality metrics.

- Drive automation testing initiatives to improve testing efficiency and reduce manual effort.

- Collaborate with development teams to identify quality risks and address issues before release.

- Review test plans, test cases, automation scripts and quality documentation.

- Manage release dependencies, environment readiness and deployment validation.

- Coordinate smoke testing, sanity testing and post-release verification.

- Lead root-cause analysis for production defects and recurring quality issues.

- Ensure proper documentation of release notes, test results, known issues and deployment approvals.

- Implement continuous improvement initiatives across QA processes and release management practices.

- Work closely with DevOps teams to align testing activities with CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows.

Mandatory Skills & Qualifications :

- Strong experience in Software Quality Assurance, Quality Engineering, Test Management or Release Management.

- Hands-on understanding of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC).

- Experience managing functional, regression, integration, system and UAT testing.

- Strong knowledge of test planning, test case design, test execution and defect lifecycle management.

- Experience with test management and defect tracking tools such as Jira, Zephyr or TestRail.

- Familiarity with automation testing frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress or equivalent.

- Understanding of API testing using Postman, REST Assured or similar tools.

- Experience coordinating software releases across development, QA, infrastructure and business teams.

- Knowledge of release planning, version control, deployment validation and rollback procedures.

- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and integration of automated testing into deployment workflows.

- Ability to assess release risks, identify quality gaps and drive corrective actions.

- Strong analytical, problem-solving and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Skills :

- Experience with performance and load testing tools such as JMeter or LoadRunner.

- Familiarity with Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI or Azure DevOps.

- Exposure to cloud environments such as AWS, Azure or GCP.

- Understanding of Docker, Kubernetes and containerized application deployments.

- Knowledge of security testing, vulnerability assessment and compliance requirements.

- Experience implementing quality metrics, release dashboards and defect analytics.

- Familiarity with Agile, Scrum and DevOps delivery methodologies.

- Relevant certifications such as ISTQB, Certified Scrum Master or equivalent quality and testing certifications.

Key Skills :

Quality Assurance, Quality Engineering, Release Management, Software Testing, Test Strategy, Test Automation, Functional Testing, Regression Testing, Integration Testing, UAT, Jira, Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, API Testing, Postman, Defect Management, CI/CD, Release Governance, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, TestRail, SDLC, STLC, Deployment Management