Corporate Vice President - Quality Engineering & Enablement Lead

New York Life•New York, NY

3d•$119,000 - $170,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The market for insurance and financial solutions is evolving rapidly, driven by changes in customer expectations, the economic environment, and the competitive landscape. This changing marketplace provides tailwinds that New York Life can capitalize on to drive growth and headwinds that we must actively address to enhance resiliency. As a result, the way we approach go-to-market must evolve. We undertook a significant step in this direction by evolving to the operating model. Our vision is to be a leading provider of human-led holistic guidance to affluent and middle markets, enabled by seamless and differentiated experiences across solutions and channels that set us apart in the financial services industry. With visibility into their full financial picture, a tailored holistic financial plan, and the agent’s expertise, prospects will clearly understand the solutions needed to help them both protect and prosper. They will be able to seamlessly apply for multiple solutions to address their broad financial needs. Enabled by a comprehensive view of their finances, clients will have periodic reviews with their agents to assess progress against goals. They will have the flexibility to manage accounts and transactions quickly across our full solution suite in one place through their preferred channel. We will invest in experience enhancements across multiple constituents (e.g., clients, new agents, top advisors, field managers, service professionals). Our goal is to be easy to do business with and to leverage our collective and unified strength, enhancing our position as the preferred destination for both agents and clients. Role Summary: The Quality Engineering Architecture & Enablement Leader is responsible for defining and executing the strategy, architecture, engineering standards, and automation capabilities across Product Solutions. The initial mandate for this leader is to establish a consistent, scalable Quality Engineering foundation across product domains, creating the common infrastructure, engineering practices, tooling, and standards required to improve quality and accelerate delivery. This includes establishing a cohesive approach to test environments, test case management, test data, automation frameworks, and integration with software delivery pipelines. As these capabilities mature, the role will extend vertically into individual product domains, creating a federated model that combines common Quality Engineering infrastructure and standards with deep domain-specific expertise and accountability. This role requires a deeply technical leader who began their career in hands-on engineering, personally built automation and Quality Engineering solutions, and progressed through architecture and engineering leadership roles while maintaining strong technical credibility. This is not a traditional Quality Assurance or testing leadership role. The successful candidate will approach quality as an engineering discipline, embedding quality throughout the software development lifecycle. The leader will bring significant experience delivering complex, highly integrated financial services programs, preferably within Insurance, Annuities, and Wealth Management, spanning interconnected applications, policy administration platforms, calculation engines, integrations, data platforms, vendor solutions, and legacy and modern technologies.

Requirements

15+ years of progressive engineering and Quality Engineering experience, with significant experience designing and delivering quality solutions for large-scale, mission-critical enterprise platforms.
Demonstrated early-career hands-on engineering experience is required, including personally building automation frameworks or engineering solutions and progressing through technical and architecture roles into senior engineering leadership.
10+ years leading Quality Engineering or related engineering organizations responsible for complex enterprise technology delivery.
Deep expertise in Quality Engineering architecture and enterprise-scale automation, including automation frameworks, API and integration testing, data validation, performance engineering, test data management, service virtualization, and continuous testing.
Significant experience delivering complex financial services technology programs, with Insurance, Annuities, and Wealth Management experience strongly preferred, including familiarity with policy administration, product configuration, calculation engines, new business, servicing, integrations, and data platforms.
Experience engineering quality across complex environments spanning legacy and distributed systems, cloud platforms, APIs, event-driven architectures, third-party solutions, batch processing, and enterprise data dependencies.
Demonstrated experience integrating automated Quality Engineering into CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines.
Experience transforming traditional QA organizations into engineering-led, automation-first Quality Engineering capabilities.
Experience with performance, scalability, resiliency, reliability engineering, observability, and production validation for mission-critical platforms.
Demonstrated experience applying AI-assisted engineering, Generative AI, and intelligent automation to Quality Engineering.
Strong architectural judgment with the ability to identify quality and testability risks, influence technical designs, and balance engineering rigor with pragmatic delivery.
Exceptional technical communication skills with the ability to engage credibly with engineers and architects while communicating quality strategy, risk, investment requirements, and delivery readiness to senior executives and business leaders.
Bachelor’s degree in a technical discipline. Advanced degree preferred but not required.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree preferred but not required.

Responsibilities

Define and own the Quality Engineering strategy, target-state architecture, and standards across Product Solutions.
Establish consistent Quality Engineering infrastructure across domains, including environments, automation frameworks, test management, test data, tooling, reporting, and quality metrics, while rationalizing fragmented tools and frameworks to improve reuse and productivity.
Define enterprise automation architecture and reusable frameworks that support both common and product-specific requirements.
Define testing architecture across layers, optimizing where and how quality is validated to improve speed, coverage, maintainability, and cost while reducing unnecessary reliance on end-to-end testing.
Partner with product-domain engineering and architecture leaders to define domain-specific testing strategies spanning functional, API, integration, data, end-to-end, performance, resiliency, and production validation.
Embed automated testing, quality gates, observability, and continuous validation into CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines.
Apply AI, Generative AI, and intelligent automation to improve test design, automation development, test maintenance, defect analysis, root-cause identification, and overall Quality Engineering productivity.
Assess the current Quality Engineering landscape and execute a multi-year transformation roadmap that establishes common capabilities across Product Solutions and progressively deepens domain-level maturity.
Establish the environment and test data strategy for complex, interconnected systems, addressing availability, configuration, dependencies, data provisioning, third parties, service virtualization, and automated validation.
Provide Quality Engineering architecture and enablement leadership for large, complex financial services programs spanning multiple products, platforms, technology organizations, vendors, and delivery teams.
Establish measurable Quality Engineering outcomes across automation, environment stability, engineering productivity, defect prevention, release quality, resiliency, and production stability.
Build and develop a strong Quality Engineering organization and technical community, including senior engineers, architects, and engineering leaders.
Establish clear accountability between shared Quality Engineering capabilities and domain engineering teams, ensuring consistent engineering standards and practices while maintaining strong domain-level quality accountability.