Vice President - Software Quality & Test Engineering - IT Product Firm

Our client is the captive of a IT Product company- A leader in its niche in the North American Market

Role Title : Vice President, Software Quality Assurance & Test Engineering

Reporting : to Head of India ( Country Manager ) and dotted line to global Head for Quality in the US

The person will have a team of over 100 folks who report to him or her and manage half the product portfolio for the company ( i.e. about 12 products)

The VP Quality Assurance and Test Engineering is responsible for :

- Champion emerging and situationally appropriate Quality Assurance practices;

- Lead an Agile transformation and know how to apply the appropriate methodologies when (agile/waterfall) appropriate;

- Demonstrate an outstanding ability to understand system architectures and new technologies;

- Develop and provide valuable feedback into complete test strategies;

- Implement innovate testing approaches to solve technical problems and have a commitment to great execution

- Holistically the VP QA & TE is responsible for all aspects of core Test Engineering capabilities that function as an integrated service within the office of the CTO inclusive of engineering, technology operations, security, data and architecture.

Responsibilities will also include the following :

- Nurture and develop a highly empowered software development team. Push down decision making to the lowest organizational levels possible.

- Drive implementation of global processes for Lean Agile Journey (LAJ) that support the delivery of high quality within an Agile development environment and also support rapid development of functionality for frequent releases.

- Own and guide the necessary cultural and management practices for an effective organizational transformation to highly effective Lean-Agile teams.

- Collaborate with peers across the whole organization; across India and across US and across the company to model highly effective matrix management.

- Align with global corporate and R&D strategy and collaborate with peers to define appropriate local initiatives and programs to translate strategy to action.

- Manage and lead QA Activities for all initiatives across several product lines.

- Design and implement processes that support the production of rigorous test cases within an agile development environment and also support rapid execution of regression tests for subsequent releases.

- Set direction for the selection, adoption and effective use of automated testing tools for enterprise software products and systems.

- Champion the development of a comprehensive functional, non-functional and mobile test strategies covering both manual and automation testing.

- Produce quality dashboards, which highlight the quality of release and provide predictability for production readiness.

- Implement a risk-based approach to product testing that drives towards a - zero defects- goal while not materially slowing the development and release processes.

- Be an advocate for Quality Assurance best practices across the entire SDLC. Pro-actively facilitate continuous improvement in all areas of the SDLC from continuous integration, estimating and tracking of artifacts to execution of test process through the UAT phase.

- Assessing on-time delivery and supplied quality performance of the firms development and testing cycle.

- Set strategic goals and monitor results of the quality performance.

- Ensure that the staffing of quality resources is accomplished and is consistently applied at appropriate levels.

- Conduct regular management reviews across all areas in order to assess the overall health and performance of Quality Management System.

- Manage quality audit program and establish and promote best practices.

- Ensure all released products, QA processes and tools are compliant with industry regulations including HIPPA, SOC-II and ePHI.

Person Profile :

- 18 years experience with more than 10 years in a Product company

- Significant experience (10+ years) in progressively responsible positions in software quality assurance, Build and Release, software engineering/product development, Dev-Ops/Tech-Ops with at least 5 years within an enterprise software company with strong leadership experience as a hands-on technologist in a large, complex, fast paced and dynamic company

- Experience in building & transforming QA teams and designing or redesigning QA, Testing and Test Automation related processes in a very complex environment that is constantly evolving; applying best practices which produce enhanced operating results.

- Experience with quality methodologies including strong opinions on optimal ways to develop and execute regression, integration, exploratory and end-to end testing.

- Hands-on experience implementing test automation; knowledge of automated testing architectures, tools and processes. Familiarity with Selenium and Performance Center toolset is strongly desired as well as other automation and performance tools and frameworks.

- Demonstrated experience in release test planning, test case management, software defect analysis.

- Well-developed knowledge and experience with test automation frameworks and tools as well as code coverage tools to measure automation effectiveness.

- Knowledge of emerging software development and project management processes and execution methodologies including Agile and experience in continuous integration.

- Proficiency in a wide variety of enterprise software, cloud service, application technologies, programming languages and relevant frameworks.

- Proficiency in web development including .NET, HTTP, REST, APIs, especially in enterprise software with scale.

- Proficiency in large data sets, SQL databases, and in optimizing database access.

- Experience with integrating application components across technology stacks and platforms.

- Experience working with globally distributed teams.