Director - Quality Engineering
First seen by Alion on Oct 16, 2026.
Key Responsibilities :
Quality Engineering & Strategy :
- Lead, develop, and scale a high-performing functional QA team, establishing standardized testing practices across the organization.
- Own end-to-end defect prevention, from product requirement analysis through development, testing, and production release.
- Partner with product managers and engineering teams to translate complex requirements into comprehensive, risk-based test strategies and plans.
- Drive adoption of internal automation tools and QA platforms such as TestRail to expand test coverage and improve efficiency.
- Define, monitor, and improve quality metrics, including defect containment, defect escape, and rejection rates.
- Champion shift-left testing practices by embedding quality checks early in the software development lifecycle.
- Establish testing standards, processes, and best practices to improve product reliability and release confidence.
Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration :
- Recruit, mentor, develop, and retain high-performing QA and Quality Engineering professionals.
- Collaborate with product, development, DevOps, and other cross-functional teams to improve quality outcomes.
- Manage vendor relationships, QA tooling contracts, and relevant technology partnerships.
- Promote engineering discipline through CI/CD best practices, Quality Management System (QMS) frameworks, and operational excellence.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA), incident reviews, and blameless post-mortems to prevent recurring issues.
- Build a culture of transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement across engineering teams.
- Influence quality standards and processes across multiple product teams, including teams outside the direct reporting structure.
Required Skills & Experience:
- Proven experience leading and scaling Quality Engineering or QA teams in a complex software development environment.
- Strong expertise in functional testing, test automation strategies, and quality assurance methodologies.
- Hands-on knowledge of automation frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, or Cypress.
- Experience with QA management and reporting tools such as TestRail and Allure.
- Strong understanding of quality metrics, defect lifecycle management, and data-driven process improvement.
- Experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS.
- Knowledge of Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles.
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines, agile development methodologies, and software release processes.
- Experience with Jira, Confluence, and related collaboration tools.
- Excellent leadership, communication, stakeholder-management, and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to influence cross-functional teams and communicate technical quality concerns to senior leadership.
Preferred Candidate Profile :
- Experience establishing quality engineering standards across multiple product teams.
- Strong background in continuous testing, automation-led quality assurance, and shift-left practices.
- Experience improving defect prevention, test coverage, release confidence, and production stability.
- Ability to balance strategic quality initiatives with operational execution.
- Demonstrated success in building collaborative, accountable, and high-performing QA teams.
Skills
Quality Head, Automation Testing, Software Quality Assurance, Selenium, Cypress, Playwright Testing, Testing, Test Strategy