Quality Assurance Practice Lead

American National Insurance•League City, TX

6d•Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a Quality Assurance Practice Lead to own the software quality practice across American National's agile delivery teams. The Quality Assurance Practice Lead will set the standards that define when work is ready to build and ready to release, the test architecture that spans teams, and the IT and Business coordination that carries a feature through user acceptance. This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will not manage a testing team. You will set the standards every team works to, coach the people who apply them, and own the measurement and governance that make quality visible. The operating model is explicit: IT owns environments, defect resolution, and technical support; the Business owns acceptance scenarios, the acceptance decision, and user signoff; Business and IT share ownership of test planning, coordination, and go-live readiness.

Requirements

10 or more years in software quality engineering, testing, or quality architecture, including at least 3 years operating above the individual team level, across multiple teams, a program, or an enterprise practice.
Demonstrated ownership of a quality standard that other teams adopted, with the ability to describe how that adoption was won.
Hands-on depth in Azure DevOps: Boards, Test Plans, and Pipelines, including requirement-based suites, configurations, shared parameters, and Work Item Query Language (WIQL) queries.
Experience coaching Given/When/Then or equivalent structured acceptance criteria with Product Owners and Scrum Masters in refinement.
Experience designing and coordinating user acceptance testing where the Business, not IT, held the acceptance decision.
Experience defining risk-based regression scope, and the judgment to defend what was deliberately excluded.
Working fluency with test automation and CI/CD quality gates sufficient to direct and review automation work.
Hands-on use of AI assistance in quality or delivery workflow, with a clear articulation of where the human decision stays.
A track record of influence without formal authority, and written communication strong enough that standards are followed because they are clear.

Nice To Haves

Life insurance, annuity, or financial services delivery experience, particularly policy administration, new business, or distribution systems.
Experience in a regulated environment with SOX and audit obligations touching software delivery.
Experience standing up or leading a Community of Practice, and SAFe or scaled agile experience, particularly quality practices across one or more ARTs.
ISTQB certification at Advanced Level, or equivalent demonstrated depth.
Test data management and masking experience in an environment holding non-public personal information.

Responsibilities

Own and evolve the acceptance criteria standard and testability rubric and govern changes to it through an agreed review path.
Partner with Product Managers, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters to raise story testability, coaching Given/When/Then acceptance criteria in refinement and keep testability embedded in the Definition of Done.
Own test plan and suite architecture in Azure Test Plans, including requirement-based traceability from test case to user story.
Own regression and smoke suite composition as a documented, risk-based decision, including the rationale for each test in the suite.
Design test coverage for cross-team features and end-to-end business journeys that no single team owns.
Own the UAT operating model and its RACI, and coach business acceptance testers to author their own scenarios rather than authoring on their behalf.
Own release readiness assessment and ensure every feature has a named business owner accountable for signoff.
Advise on where automated test gates belong in Azure Pipelines and what each gate asserts, sequence automation behind foundational fixes rather than ahead of them, and own gate governance: named approvers, required justification, restricted edit rights, and monthly bypass review.
Own and extend AI-assisted quality tooling that audits acceptance criteria, scores testability, and drafts first-pass test scenarios from stories, under the principle that AI drafts and humans decide, with every generated artifact labeled and cleared by a named reviewer.
Own the quality measurement plan and dashboards and report quality trends against baseline to IT and Business leadership on a predictable cadence.
Chair the Testing Community of Practice, own its standards backlog, and coach embedded testers, developers, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters.
Surface environment and test data constraints, and name residual risk when an adequate test environment or representative data cannot be provided.