Head of Quality Engineering (QA)
$200,000–$250,000 year
HybridMarina del Rey, California, United States
Job Summary
Own Sift's overall quality strategy and serve as the accountable owner for release quality sign-off across all customer-facing products. Build and lead the QA function, scaling to roughly 30 people, primarily through external vendor teams managed through clear quality bars, throughput expectations, and SLAs. Establish formal test planning for every major feature and release, including regression suites, and enforce a QA pass on all user-facing products. Organize testing into embedded squad testing and dedicated release testing, while applying AI to accelerate test definition and internal tool building. Partner with engineering to expand automated testing over time and coach engineers on self-testing across web, desktop, and backend systems. Define and track quality metrics and service-level objectives, reporting directly to engineering leadership and customers as needed.
Required Qualifications
- At least 8 years of experience in QA
- Track record of senior quality leadership
- Scope and judgment expected of a principal-level or director-level owner
- At least 3 years of experience managing people
- Experience building and managing teams
- Experience developing test leads
- Direct experience managing external or outsourced QA vendor teams
- Strong QA fundamentals: test planning
- Strong QA fundamentals: test case design
- Strong QA fundamentals: regression strategy
- Strong QA fundamentals: triage
- Strong QA fundamentals: release management
- Hands-on quality experience across frontend
- Depth in web
- Ideally desktop
- Backend systems
- AI-forward approach to QA
- Using modern tooling to accelerate test definition
- Using modern tooling to accelerate documentation
- Using modern tooling to accelerate internal tool building
- Knowing when manual testing is the right call
- Highly organized
- Autonomous
- Comfortable building structure in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment
- Strong communication skills
- Ability to work with internal stakeholders
- Ability to speak credibly with external customers
- Experience in B2B
- U.S. citizen
- Lawful permanent resident
- Protected individual such as an asylee or refugee
- Compliance with ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations)
- Compliance with EAR (Export Administration Regulations)
Desired Qualifications
- Experience in aerospace
- Experience in defense
- Experience in robotics
- Experience in autonomous systems
- Experience in another mission-critical or safety-relevant domain
- Experience standing up a QA discipline from scratch at a growth-stage company
- Familiarity with observability
- Familiarity with telemetry
- Familiarity with large-scale data platforms
- Extensive B2C experience
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