Head of Quality Assurance

We are hiring a Head of Quality Assurance to own quality across everything Delta6Labs ships. You will lead an established QA organisation of 15+ engineers embedded across product squads, and you will report directly to the CTO / VP Engineering & Product Development as part of the engineering leadership team.

Qualification:

B.E. / B.Tech / M.C.A. in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline. Equivalent practical experience considered.

Quality strategy and accountability:

- Own the end-to-end quality strategy for all Delta6Labs platforms - exchanges, wallets, trading systems, and white-label deployments and translate it into a roadmap with clear quarterly outcomes.

- Define and enforce release-readiness criteria, entry and exit gates, and go/no-go authority.

- Establish a risk-based test strategy that concentrates effort where financial, regulatory and reputational exposure is highest.

- Partner with Product, Engineering, DevSecOps and Security so quality is designed in from requirements through to production monitoring.

Test automation and quality engineering:

- Own the design and evolution of our automation frameworks across API, service, integration, data and UI layers.

- Drive automated regression suites into CI/CD so that every merge and every release candidate is gated on evidence.

- Build and own performance, load, soak and stress testing for high-throughput, low-latency paths.

- Establish contract testing between services and dependable test-data management across environments.

- Drive data-integrity and reconciliation testing across ledgers, balances, fee calculations and transaction histories.

- Partner with Security and DevSecOps on security regression, dependency and configuration checks.

- Champion shift-left practices: testability reviews at design time, unit and integration coverage standards, static analysis, feature flags, and safe progressive rollout.

Team leadership and development:

- Lead, coach and grow a QA organisation of 8+ engineers; set clear ownership boundaries between squad-embedded QA and a central quality-engineering function.

- Own hiring end to end - define the bar, build the interview loop, and recruit manual, automation and SDET talent.

- Define career ladders, competency frameworks, goal setting and performance reviews for the QA function.

- Build a culture of engineering rigour and psychological safety, where defects are data, blameless root-cause analysis is routine, and escalation is expected.

- Act as the senior quality voice with clients and stakeholders.

Process, metrics and continuous improvement:

- Define the defect lifecycle, severity and priority taxonomy, triage cadence and response SLAs.

- Instrument quality and report it on a fixed cadence: escaped-defect rate, defect density, automation coverage and stability, flake rate, mean time to detect and recover, regression cycle time, and release-failure rate.

- Run structured root-cause analysis on production incidents and close every loop with permanent test coverage.

- Rationalise tooling, environments and test infrastructure against cost and value.

- Maintain the traceability and documentation trail that our ISO obligations, client audits and security reviews depend on.

What you must bring:

- 10+ years in software quality assurance, including 4+ years leading QA teams, with direct experience managing a team of eight or more engineers.

- Demonstrated ownership of quality for a production financial, payments, trading or otherwise high-transaction-volume platform.

- Deep, hands-on API and backend testing expertise: REST and WebSocket, authentication and authorisation flows, pagination and rate limiting, idempotency, error contracts, and database-level validation with confident SQL.

- A real automation engineering background - you have built or substantially rebuilt a framework yourself. Strong in at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or Java, with tools such as pytest, Playwright, REST Assured, Postman/Newman or equivalents.

- Proven ownership of performance and load testing using k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust or similar.

- Experience testing microservices and event-driven systems, including Kafka or RabbitMQ-style messaging.

- A track record of hiring, mentoring and retaining QA engineers.

- Excellent written and verbal communication.

Nice to have:

- Direct experience with cryptocurrency exchanges, digital-asset custody or trading systems.

- Familiarity with custody and wallet infrastructure, KYC/AML vendors and blockchain analytics.

- Exposure to blockchain and smart-contract testing concepts.

- Experience in a multi-tenant or white-label delivery model.

- Working knowledge of security testing fundamentals and fintech-relevant standards - OWASP, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001.

- Prior experience in an organisation delivering both product and client services.

- Relevant certifications (ISTQB Advanced Level, CSTE) - welcome, though never a substitute for demonstrated work.