Director, Quality Assurance & External Custom

American Association of Motor Vehicles•Arlington, VA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

AAMVA is seeking a Director of Quality Assurance and External Customer Support to lead and elevate the quality of a portfolio of complex, integration-heavy data systems and to own the technical support experience for the external partners who depend on them. This is a leadership role for someone who pairs deep, current technical credibility with exceptional people leadership. The platforms run on a cloud-native, microservices architecture on Azure, with REST interfaces across all internal and external integrations, and significant investment in AI-assisted test engineering. The Director will set the quality strategy for the future, build the team capable of delivering it, and ensure external customers receive responsive, expert support. The role involves leading a department through transformation, raising technical capability, developing the team and its leaders, and aligning everyone around modern, automation-first, AI-forward quality engineering.

Requirements

12+ years in software quality / test engineering, including significant experience leading teams — and leading managers (manager-of-managers experience).
A track record of transforming a team or quality organization — raising technical capability, modernizing practices, making and executing tough people and structural decisions.
Deep, currently relevant technical depth. Ability to set technical direction a team will follow, not just manage process.
Strong command of: REST/API testing and contract testing (e.g. Pact or equivalent) across microservices.
Strong command of: Integration, component, and end-to-end testing of distributed, cloud-native systems.
Strong command of: Test automation strategy and frameworks; service virtualization / mocking to test services in isolation.
Strong command of: CI/CD pipelines and modern quality engineering practice.
Experience testing cloud-native, microservices-based systems on a major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP).
Familiarity with modern and AI-assisted test engineering — using AI to accelerate test design, debugging, and reporting.
Demonstrated ability to own an external customer support function — incident and escalation management, SLAs, and partner/technical support.
Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, including executive-level reporting.

Nice To Haves

Experience extending test automation and validation into data analytics and BI pipelines (e.g. Synapse, Power BI, or comparable) — building component and end-to-end coverage for analytics solution chains.
Hands-on familiarity with UI automation tools such as Selenium, Playwright, or Cypress.
Experience with NoSQL / document databases (e.g. Cosmos DB) alongside relational stores.
Exposure to performance, security, or compliance testing as part of a holistic quality strategy.
Background in regulated or complex data environments — fintech, healthcare, government, insurance, or large-scale data exchange.
Experience supporting external integrating partners or third-party API consumers at scale.
Relevant certifications (e.g. ISTQB Advanced, CSQE) a plus.

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end quality strategy across all products and programs — functional, integration, performance, security, and data quality.
Lead the organization through a multi-year modernization of its tools, practices, and skills toward automation-first, AI-assisted quality engineering.
Set the technical direction for testing approaches for microservices, REST/contract testing, distributed and asynchronous systems, and data validation.
Define quality gates, release criteria, and governance that integrate cleanly with engineering and program delivery.
Lead through a management layer: coach, develop, and hold accountable the managers running QA and support functions; raise the bar on leadership across the org.
Build, grow, and where needed restructure the team to match where the technology is headed — hiring, developing existing talent, and managing performance with fairness and clarity.
Create career paths and skill-development programs that move the team toward modern engineering practices.
Champion an AI-forward test engineering approach, including AI-assisted generation of test plans and cases, accelerated debugging, and intelligent reporting.
Guide test strategy for a microservices ecosystem on Azure (App Service Plans and AKS), including service isolation, contract testing, and integration validation across services and third parties.
Ensure robust validation of data across modern data stores (e.g. Cosmos DB, Azure SQL) and across REST interfaces for all internal and external integrations.
Drive measurable improvement in coverage, defect escape rate, automation ratio, and cycle time.
Own the support experience for external customers — government agencies, federal partners, and commercial/third-party data consumers who integrate with and rely on our systems.
Lead technical and escalation support: incident management, issue triage and resolution, SLA definition and adherence, and partner integration support.
Build a tight feedback loop between field issues and quality engineering, so what surfaces in support strengthens test coverage and product quality.
Serve as a senior point of escalation for major external-facing incidents, leading root-cause and corrective-action processes.
Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, and Program leadership to manage risk and balance delivery speed against quality.
Report quality and support health to executive leadership through clear metrics and business-impact narratives.