Quality Engineering Manager

Quality Engineering Manager We are looking for a Quality Engineering Manager to directly manage a team of 5–8 quality engineers, own our test automation strategy, and embed quality into the full development lifecycle. This is a player-coach role — you will be embedded into a sprint team and expected to carry an individual contributor workload alongside your management responsibilities, including testing tickets, regression, and hands-on automation work. This requires strong technical depth, critical thinking, CI/CD integration, and application of AI-assisted testing — combined with direct people management authority including hiring, performance management, and career development. Responsibilities Quality Leadership Define, lead, and audit progress on quality initiatives aligned to project and product needs. Drive products from inception to release through technical and thought leadership on quality. Collaborate cross-functionally to improve frameworks, methodologies, and processes for test planning, execution, and reporting. Lead standards-based compliance and process improvement efforts as needed. Test Automation & AI Bring an AI-first mindset to all aspects of the test engineering lifecycle — from test design and generation to execution, triage, and reporting. Design, build, and maintain automation frameworks from scratch for large-scale, cross-platform applications for API and or UI testing — including custom C#, Playwright or UFT frameworks. Incorporate AI tools into test automation workflows — including AI-assisted test generation, self-healing frameworks, and intelligent test selection. Adopt emerging AI/ML testing tools to improve coverage and reduce manual effort. CI/CD Integration Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) to enable fast feedback loops. Define and enforce quality gates within deployment pipelines to prevent regressions from reaching production. Monitor pipeline health, test flakiness, and execution times; drive improvements continuously. Testing & Defect Management Embedded on a sprint team as an individual contributor — actively pick up and execute testing tickets, adding automated tests, create and review pull requests, regression testing and exploratory testing alongside the team. Set and enforce standards for exploratory, functional, and regression testing across the team. Oversee root cause analysis on defects; ensure clear, consistent bug reporting practices. Work with engineers and support teams to identify, triage, prioritize, and drive resolution of defects. People Management Directly manage 5–8 quality engineers — this includes hiring, onboarding, along with performance management, having difficult conversations and compensation input. Set and communicate team and individual objectives and KPIs; hold the team accountable to them. Conduct structured performance reviews; provide timely, constructive feedback and address underperformance directly by assessing individual skills, identifying gaps, and building targeted development plans and coaching programs. Set and communicate team and individual objectives and KPIs; hold the team accountable to them. Recognize and retain high performers; actively manage team health and morale. Required Qualifications 5 years in software quality engineering 2 years as a direct people manager with a team of 4 or more direct reports (preferred) Hands-on experience with test automation (.net/. net core/ C#/ Api Testing/ UI testing with Playwright/Selenium/Cypress preferred) and in integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. Practical experience using AI tools in test automation workflows. Proven track record of conducting performance reviews, making compensation recommendations, and managing full employee lifecycle including difficult conversations. Strong root cause analysis skills across complex, cross-functional and cross-product defects. Preferred Qualifications Health ... (truncated, view full listing at source)