Description :

Job Description - QA Practice Lead (Senior Manager)

Role Overview :

QA Practice Lead (Senior Manager), owns the strategic mandate of driving testing excellence across delivery programs, building scalable QA capabilities, governing quality outcomes, enhancing automation reliability, and positioning QA as a release-assurance led Center of Excellence. The role influences cross-functional engineering stakeholders, mentors QA leaders, governs practice-level metrics, and ensures predictable and production-safe releases across programs.

Key Responsibilities :

1. Practice & CoE Leadership :

- Define and govern enterprise QA standards, test frameworks, tooling strategy, automation blueprints, and quality gates.

- Build reusable assets, reliability layers, test accelerators and maturity roadmap for the QA Center of Excellence.

- Drive org-wide adoption of Shift-Left QA, Continuous Testing, CI/CD test stability, and DevOps quality governance.

2. Delivery Assurance (Multi-Program) :

- Govern all QA streams : Functional, Regression, Integration, API, Mobile, Performance, Security, Accessibility and Cloud-native testing across delivery.

- Lead release-quality governance, test traceability, quality risk identification, mitigation, and production leakage prevention.

- Ensure test environments, test data, automation stability, and execution SLAs remain healthy across programs.

3. QA Talent Strategy & Leadership :

- Own QA hiring blueprint, competency frameworks, talent pipeline, upskilling, utilization and career growth charter.

- Mentor and develop QA Tech Leads, Seniors, Automation Leads, and QA Owners across delivery units.

- Drive capacity forecasting, resource allocation, utilization balancing and skill scalability across engagements.

4. Stakeholder & Client Influence :

- Act as senior quality advisor to Delivery, Engineering, Product and Client stakeholders for effort sizing, quality risk profiling, estimation governance and automation ROI.

- Ensure QA considerations are embedded into scope, sizing, architecture, proposals, and delivery commitments.

- Publish quality insights via dashboards and stakeholder-facing reports with clarity and confidence.

5. Metrics Transparency & Governance :

- Define and govern org-level QA KPIs (Defects ? Coverage ? Automation ? Velocity ? Quality leakage).

- Drive continuous process improvements through data-led governance, tool optimization, and QA reliability engineering initiatives.

What This Role Will NOT Do :

- Will not own single-project QA execution accountability.

- Will not write or micromanage project-level test cases or daily test execution.

- Will not replace engineering owners in defect accountability.

- Will not operate only in downstream/manual-only QA cycles.

Required Qualifications :

- Bachelors Degree in CS/IT/Engineering or related field

- 8+ years QA experience including 3+ years in QA leadership or practice ownership roles

- Hands-on exposure to automation, CI/CD, API, performance and security testing tools

- Strong stakeholder influence, communication, governance-first QA mindset, and talent leadership

- Demonstrated ability to scale QA teams and govern release-safe quality outcomes

Preferred Qualifications :

- Cloud-native QA experience (AWS, Azure, GCP testing)

- Scripting proficiency (Python/Java/JavaScript/TypeScript)

- ISTQB Advanced/Expert, Agile Testing, Scrum Master, Security/Performance specialization

- Prior experience building QA CoE frameworks and reusable test accelerators