Lead Specialist, Technical Architect

Pearson•United States,

2h•$150,000 - $160,000•Remote

About The Position

ExamDeveloper is a web-based exam development platform that allows customers to write, review, and manage questions on their exams. Customers rely on ExamDeveloper to support the full workflow around item writing, collaborative review, scoring, and test management. ExamDeveloper is feature-rich and used by clients in a variety of ways, which creates a high volume of testing, automation, and release-readiness decisions. The product is supported by multiple Agile software development teams and a large distributed quality engineering community, including many QA engineers based in India. Clear asynchronous communication and consistent quality standards are essential to the role. As a Quality Engineer Architect aligned to the E30 expert track, you provide domain-level quality leadership for ExamDeveloper. This role is unique within the ExamDeveloper quality organization and is not intended to define a standard Lead progression step. This is not a people manager role, but it does provide technical direction, standards, coaching, artifact review, and quality-process leadership across multiple Agile teams and a large distributed QA organization. You are the subject-matter expert on the domain, on automation approaches, and on the scenarios that matter most to customers — and you think like an end customer of the product. You are relied upon when quality challenges are highly complex, ambiguous, cross-system, or business-critical, and when decisions require strong judgment across test strategy, automation architecture, reliability, and release confidence. You lead through expertise, not formal authority — shaping the quality system, mentoring senior engineers, reviewing critical QA work, and spending selective hands-on time in testing or automation investigation where your expertise has the greatest impact.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
8+ years of professional quality engineering, software testing, or test automation experience.
3+ years operating as a domain-level quality expert or SME across complex, distributed platforms.
Demonstrated influence on quality practices, automation frameworks, or standards adopted across multiple teams.
Deep experience with test automation strategy, tooling, and quality improvement.
Experience operating in large product environments with multiple Agile teams, distributed QA teams, and high volumes of testing and release-readiness decisions.

Nice To Haves

Recognized expertise in automation architecture, quality strategy, reliability, and test tooling.
Proficiency with scripting and object-oriented programming languages.
Experience with Gauge, Selenium/WebDriver, C#, VM-based test execution, or cloud testing infrastructure is relevant to the ExamDeveloper environment.
Strong grounding in Agile delivery, cloud-native environments (Azure/Kubernetes), and CI/CD quality gates.
Experience with SQL, telemetry, dashboards, observability, and production quality signals.
Familiarity with LLMs / ML and experience building or evaluating AI-assisted QA tooling, preferred.
Experience supporting accessibility compliance and WCAG standards, preferred.
Excellent communication and the ability to influence senior stakeholders without formal authority.
Strong written communication skills, including the ability to guide distributed teams through clear asynchronous communication.

Responsibilities

Set strategic direction for the ExamDeveloper quality system, including process, automation, tooling, training, metrics, quality gates, and release confidence across the domain.
Partner with the Product Architect and Engineering leadership to determine long-term automation and quality strategy.
Continually evaluate the process, tools, technology, data, and people practices involved in QA work, then drive improvements that make testing more automated, efficient, sustainable, and aligned to business risk.
Establish quality metrics that inform decision-making, including automation health, test reliability, defect leakage, cycle time, release readiness, and the effectiveness of QA investments.
Serve as the domain subject-matter expert on quality, automation approaches, and critical test scenarios.
Drive development and maintenance of robust, thorough test coverage across the domain's application areas.
Serve as expert for complex root-cause analysis, intermittent-defect investigation, and reliability challenges.
Keep current on industry best practices in automation, tooling, and approach, and assess their potential to improve the domain.
Mentor and coach senior quality engineers and build quality capability across teams.
Serve as the go-to expert for teams building out automated test suites and quality practices.
Support Engineering leadership in developing high-performing quality talent across the domain.
Evaluate emerging tools and AI-assisted testing practices that improve quality, efficiency, and delivery confidence.
Provide technical oversight of QA practices and test artifacts, reviewing work for maintainability, effectiveness, and alignment to quality standards.
Represent quality in leadership discussions and with internal or external stakeholders when issues require domain-level judgment and clear communication.