Director, Quality Engineering - Customer and Commercial

The Director, Quality Engineering is a senior individual contributor accountable for designing, building, and sustaining automated quality engineering capabilities across Customer and Commercial product teams operating under a modern Product Operating Model.
This role is hands-on and execution-oriented-responsible for creating and maintaining automated QA frameworks, pipelines, and quality platforms that enable teams to deliver faster with confidence. The Director ensures quality is engineered into products from the earliest stages of discovery through production-not validated after the fact.
Core Accountabilities
Product Model & Discovery Partnership

• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to embed automated quality strategies into product discovery and delivery.
• Ensure experiments, MVPs, and releases include automated validation aligned to customer and business outcomes.
• Advocate for testability, observability, and automation-readiness as non-negotiable design principles.

Automated Quality Engineering Strategy & Architecture

• Define and own the automated QA strategy for Customer and Commercial platforms.
• Design and maintain enterprise-grade automation frameworks covering UI, API, data, performance, and security testing.
• Establish standards for automation design, tooling, test data, and environment management.
• Make explicit trade-offs between automation depth, execution time, risk coverage, and maintainability.

Hands-On Automation Delivery & Sustainment

• Build, extend, and maintain automated QA solutions integrated directly into CI/CD pipelines.
• Ensure automation suites are reliable, fast, and actionable-minimizing false positives and brittle tests.
• Continuously refactor and improve automation to keep pace with product and platform evolution.
• Reduce reliance on manual testing by replacing it with scalable, reusable automated capabilities.

Individual Contributor Technical Leadership

• Serve as the primary technical authority for automated QA across Customer and Commercial domains.
• Lead complex automation initiatives end-to-end through direct contribution.
• Provide reference implementations, patterns, and reusable components for teams to adopt.
• Coach engineers and QE practitioners on effective automation practices (without formal people management).

Business Partnership & Communication

• Act as a trusted advisor to product and business leaders on quality risk, automation coverage, and release readiness.
• Translate automation metrics into clear business impact narratives (risk reduction, faster time-to-market, cost avoidance).
• Proactively surface quality and automation gaps that could impact customer experience or revenue.

Governance, Risk & Compliance

• Ensure automated QA solutions meet enterprise security, audit, and regulatory requirements.
• Embed traceability, evidence generation, and controls directly into automation pipelines.
• Partner with Security and Platform teams to ensure automation aligns with enterprise standards.

Success Measures

• High-confidence releases driven by automated quality signals.
• Measurable reduction in escaped defects and production incidents.
• Increased automation coverage and reduced manual testing effort.
• Faster feedback cycles for product teams.
• Automation frameworks that scale and remain maintainable over time.

Leadership Profile

• Builder-first mindset with strong technical depth
• Automation-focused, not test case driven
• Pragmatic, risk-aware, and outcome-oriented
• Influences through credibility and results, not authority
• Holds a high bar for automation quality and sustainability

Required Experience & Capabilities

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of hands-on experience building automated QA solutions.
• Proven track record creating and sustaining automation at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise in test automation frameworks, CI/CD integration, and cloud-native systems.
• Strong understanding of API, UI, data, performance, and security testing automation.
• Ability to communicate automation value and risk in business terms.