QA Architect – Legacy .NET Platforms

Techstra Solutions•Pittsburgh, PA

13d

About The Position

Techstra solutions is seeking an experienced QA Architect to define, lead, and continuously evolve the quality strategy for a mission-critical, legacy .NET application portfolio that has been in production for over 20 years. This role blends strategic ownership, technical depth, and hands-on leadership , with responsibility for guiding QA engineers and influencing engineering, product, and release practices. The QA Architect will establish pragmatic, risk-based testing architectures that respect legacy constraints while enabling stability, scalability, and incremental modernization. This individual serves as the quality authority for the platform, ensuring risk is understood, communicated, and actively managed across the organization.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in software quality engineering, including leadership responsibilities.
Deep experience testing legacy .NET applications (e.g., WebForms, WinForms, WCF, early MVC).
Proven ability to design and scale test automation architectures in constrained or legacy environments.
Strong SQL and data validation expertise (e.g., SQL Server).
Experience integrating testing into CI/CD pipelines where feasible.
Strong understanding of non-functional testing (stability, performance, data integrity).
Experience leading or influencing QA teams without relying solely on formal authority .
Ability to coach teams on quality mindset, risk assessment, and test strategy .
Strong communication skills with both technical teams and business stakeholders .
Comfort making and defending quality trade-off decisions under delivery pressure.
Experience documenting and institutionalizing knowledge in long-lived systems .

Nice To Haves

Experience in commercial banking or financial services environments.
Familiarity with banking systems such as lending, deposits, payments, treasury, or core banking platforms .
Experience working in regulated or audit-driven environments .
Exposure to compliance, SOX, or control-based SDLC expectations.

Responsibilities

Quality Architecture & Strategy Define and own the end-to-end quality and testing architecture for legacy .NET applications.
Establish risk-based testing strategies aligned with business criticality, change frequency, and regulatory expectations.
Determine the optimal balance of manual, automated, and exploratory testing in a legacy environment.
Create and maintain a long-term roadmap for improving testability, automation coverage, and quality metrics.
Balance modernization initiatives with the need to protect existing, business-critical behavior .
Technical Leadership Lead, mentor, and coach QA engineers, including mid-level testers and automation engineers.
Set standards for test design, automation frameworks, data validation, and defect management .
Review and guide test automation approaches using tools such as Selenium, Playwright, SpecFlow, NUnit/xUnit , or similar.
Partner with development leaders to influence architecture and design decisions that improve testability.
Provide hands-on support for complex or high-risk testing scenarios when required.
Legacy System Enablement Navigate, analyze, and document legacy application behavior, dependencies, and constraints .
Identify and communicate high-risk areas resulting from technical debt, tight coupling, or undocumented logic.
Define strategies for regression protection in areas with limited or no existing coverage.
Support incremental modernization patterns (e.g., strangler pattern, service extraction) from a quality perspective.
Advocate for quality improvements during refactoring and enhancement efforts .
Cross-Functional Collaboration Act as the primary QA partner to product, engineering, operations, and release management .
Translate technical testing risks into business-level impact for stakeholders.
Support release readiness, go/no-go decisions , and production validation strategies.
Align QA practices with SDLC, Agile, or hybrid delivery models .