AVP, Central Process and Governance Lead - TCOE.MGN Pak - TECH - Transformation Office.MIT - PAKCOE

Mashreq; Karachi Division; On-site; PKR 1,674,000 - 2,232,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial institution in Karachi is seeking an experienced QA professional to drive quality assurance processes within their Testing Center of Excellence. The role involves improving QA practices, managing defect lifecycles, and promoting automation and best practices across projects. The ideal candidate will have over 15 years of experience in banking QA, a relevant degree, and strong stakeholder management skills. This position is crucial for enhancing the quality and efficiency of testing across the organization.

Qualifications

• Over 15 years of experience in banking QA.
• Experience in QA and QA leadership roles.
• Strong command over defect lifecycle and defect removal efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Define and standardize QA processes, templates, and best practices across projects.
• Promote automation and innovative testing practices.
• Conduct regular audits and reviews to evaluate process adherence.

Skills

QA Processes Improvement

Automation Scripting

API Validation

Stakeholder Engagement

Defect Lifecycle Management

Education

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Economics

Tools

Azure DevOps

Jira

Confluence

Power BI

Grafana

Job description

The transformation office is working on establishing Mashreq’s Testing Center of Excellence (TCOE). It is a centralized testing framework within an organization that standardizes processes, tools, best practices, and governance. In a global bank like Mashreq, it acts as a quality assurance hub that provides strategy, tools, and resources across technology and business domains spanning retail, digital, corporate, investment banking, and regulatory areas. The purpose of the job is to augment TCOE process and artifacts, ensure their implementation on the project under test, creating test KPIs, metrics and dashboards and capturing them across Mashreq projects. The role must be self-directed and comfortable supporting the needs of multiple teams, systems, and products. The right candidate will be excited by the prospect of optimizing or even re‑designing our company’s testing practices, SOPs and architecture to support our next generation of products and Quality initiatives.

Key Result Areas

• Define, standardize, and continuously improve QA processes, templates, and best practices across all projects.
• Ensure alignment with industry standards, regulatory requirements, and Mashreq’s QA Policy.
• Promote automation, AI‑driven testing, and innovative practices to enhance process efficiency and reliability.
• Establish and maintain governance frameworks to ensure QA activities comply with internal policies and external regulations.
• Conduct regular audits, reviews, and maturity assessments to evaluate process adherence and effectiveness.
• Identify process‑related risks and implement mitigation and contingency strategies for critical QA activities.
• Define and track key QA KPIs (e.g., defect density, test coverage, cycle time) to measure process performance.
• Develop dashboards and reports to communicate insights and trends to stakeholders.
• Leverage historical data and predictive analytics to proactively identify quality risks and improvement opportunities.
• Collaborate with QA portfolio leads, developers, product managers, and business analysts to ensure process alignment.
• Facilitate cross‑functional communication and resolve process‑related conflicts to maintain consistency and quality.
• Integrate QA governance with enterprise architecture, risk, and compliance frameworks.
• Develop training materials and conduct workshops to educate teams on QA processes, governance, and tools.
• Mentor QA staff on process adoption, improvement techniques, and governance principles.
• Lead change management initiatives to drive adoption of new QA practices and reduce resistance.
• Evaluate and recommend tools that support process governance, automation, and reporting.
• Establish a central repository for QA assets, templates, best practices, and lessons learned to promote reuse and knowledge sharing.
• Define and maintain a QA maturity model to guide teams through progressive levels of process excellence.
• Benchmark QA practices against industry peers and lead continuous improvement initiatives to elevate organizational QA maturity.

Operating Environment, Framework and Boundaries, Working Relationships

• Able to Effectively Plan & Organize
• Strong Interpersonal Communication
• Assist others in the completion of their tasks to support the group goals
• Build and maintain cooperative work relationships with others

Problem Solving

• Experienced in application designing, architecting, development and deployment of TCOE manifesto. Must be efficient in banking domain and know QA best practices.
• Strong testing design and implementation skills. Experienced in banking applications.
• Feasibility Analysis – analyze the requirements to define scope and evaluate technical feasibility.

Decision Making Authority & Responsibility

• Work on the right tasks by ensuring they know their top deliverables
• Assume personal responsibility for achieving outcomes

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Over 15 years of experience in banking QA
• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in a quantitative discipline such as Computer Science, Engineering, or Economics.
• Experience in QA and QA leadership roles.
• Proficient in working with QA teams.
• Advanced skills in automation scripting, tagging conventions, and test case design.
• Strong command over defect lifecycle, severity categorization, defect aging, and defect removal efficiency (DRE).
• Handling test data provisioning, synthetic data generation, and environment setup.
• Hands‑on experience with Azure DevOps, Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, and dashboard/reporting tools like Excel, Grafana, and Power BI.
• Proficiency in validating APIs for functionality, reliability, and security.
• Ability to define and track: Automation coverage, Execution metrics (plan vs actual), Defect density and leakage trends, Productivity benchmarks (e.g., test cases/day), Exit criteria automation.
• Experience in building dashboards with auto‑populated metrics and heat maps for defect and execution trends.
• Root cause analysis, risk identification, and mitigation planning.
• Effective stakeholder engagement, cross‑functional coordination, and clear documentation.
• Leading triage calls, peer reviews, and coaching junior testers.
• Driving process optimization, standardization, and reuse of QA assets.
• Deliverables & Responsibilities: QA Strategy Documents, Test Plan & Exit Reports, Automation Strategy & Execution Summary, Weekly Status Reports & Dashboards, SOPs for QA processes.
• Weekly, monthly and quarterly QA Audits and reporting.