Senior Director of Software Quality Assurance

Appspace

1d•Remote

About The Position

As the Senior Director of Software Quality Assurance, you will own the strategy, organization, and culture of quality across Appspace's multi-product SaaS platform. This is a senior leadership role: you will build and lead a globally distributed QA organization spanning manual, automation, and performance testing, and you will set the direction for how quality is designed, measured, and continuously improved throughout the software development lifecycle. You will partner with engineering, product, and platform leadership to embed a shift-left quality mindset — making quality a shared discipline owned at the design stage, not a gate at the end. You will be accountable for the frameworks, tooling, metrics, and people that ensure Appspace ships reliable, performant, high-quality software at scale, in lockstep with our AI-driven development lifecycle (AIDLC).

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
10–15 years of experience in software quality engineering, with a significant track record in senior QA leadership roles managing managers and leads.
Demonstrated experience leading QA teams that span manual, automation, and performance testing across a large-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platform.
Proven ability to build and manage globally distributed QA teams across multiple time zones, including experience with offshore and hybrid delivery models.
Deep, hands-on understanding of the modern test automation ecosystem — Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Appium, and API testing tools (REST Assured, Postman) — with the judgment to prescribe the right approach for a given context.
Strong command of performance and reliability testing tools and practices (e.g., JMeter, k6, Gatling, Locust) and the ability to define meaningful SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets.
Experience integrating quality gates into CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) with sophisticated pass/fail logic and trend-based regression detection.
Solid understanding of modern software architecture — microservices, event-driven systems, APIs, and cloud-native platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure) — sufficient to reason about quality and performance risk across the stack.
Experience defining and operationalizing quality metrics and KPIs, and reporting quality posture to executive leadership.
Working proficiency with test management and defect tracking tools (Jira, TestRail, Xray, Zephyr) and BDD practices (Cucumber, Gherkin).
Hands-on familiarity with SQL, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and scripting in Python and/or JavaScript/TypeScript to stay credible with engineering teams.
Practical experience applying Generative AI tools (e.g., Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to accelerate test design, automation authoring, or result analysis.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills — able to produce clear strategy documents and executive-facing quality narratives.
Proven ability to lead technical discussions, drive alignment across engineering teams, and influence design decisions without direct authority.

Nice To Haves

Experience establishing quality practices for AI-assisted development pipelines and evaluating the quality of AI-generated code.
Experience with cross-browser and real-device testing at scale (BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, LambdaTest, or AWS Device Farm).
Background in security and accessibility testing integrated into the QA lifecycle.
Experience with observability and reliability practices — metrics, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), and dashboards (Grafana, Prometheus, Cloud Monitoring).
Experience scaling QA through periods of rapid growth, platform consolidation, or M&A integration.
Experience in regulated or enterprise environments with formal compliance and audit requirements.
Published work, open source contributions, or conference presentations in the software quality domain.

Responsibilities

Define and own the enterprise QA strategy and multi-year quality roadmap across Appspace's product suite including: Digital Signage, Space Reservation, Visitor Management, and Intranet, aligning quality investment with business and engineering priorities.
Build, lead, mentor, and scale a globally distributed QA organization spanning manual, automation, and performance testing, working through QA managers and leads across multiple time zones.
Establish the test automation strategy and standards, selecting and governing frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Appium, REST Assured/Postman) and driving coverage, stability, and maintainability across product domains.
Direct the performance and reliability testing practice, setting load, stress, and scalability standards and defining latency, throughput, and error-budget targets for critical service boundaries.
Own the quality gate strategy within CI/CD pipelines — defining how automated tests are triggered, what constitutes a release blocker, and how quality signals are surfaced to engineering teams and leadership.
Define the quality metrics and reporting framework — defect escape rate, test coverage, automation ROI, release readiness, and trend-based regression detection — and brief executive leadership with clear, actionable quality posture.
Champion a shift-left culture, partnering with product and engineering to embed quality practices, test design, and risk assessment early in the development lifecycle.
Drive the adoption of AI-augmented testing approaches — test generation, self-healing automation, anomaly detection, and result analysis — within the AIDLC framework, including quality practices for AI-assisted and AI-generated code.
Standardize test management, environments, and data strategy across teams (e.g., TestRail, Xray, Zephyr, Jira) to ensure traceability from requirements to results.
Own the QA budget, tooling investments, and vendor relationships, and make build-vs-buy decisions across the quality tooling landscape.
Recruit, develop, and retain top QA talent — setting career frameworks, performance standards, and a culture of continuous improvement across a global team.
Communicate quality strategy, risk assessments, and capability roadmaps to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders, influencing decisions without direct authority.
Ability to operate effectively in a globally distributed team environment across time zones.