AI-Quality Director: Lead Automation & Performance

NICE; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

NiCE-FLEX hybrid model

Job summary

NiCE is seeking a visionary engineering leader to architect and drive the quality engineering discipline into the AI era. You will own automation infrastructure, performance engineering, and AI-driven quality initiatives, building and mentoring high-performing teams that set the standard for scalable software validation.

You will disrupt legacy testing paradigms, champion agentic test generation, and embed AI-quality thinking across the SDLC—bridging engineering velocity with product

Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering or QA, with 5+ years in engineering leadership at the Director level or senior Staff+ with direct reports
• Deep hands-on background in test automation architecture — you've built frameworks from scratch
• Proven track record leading performance engineering at scale (10,000+ concurrent users, distributed systems, cloud-native environments)
• Experience shipping or operating AI/ML systems and understanding the unique quality challenges they introduce
• Prior success managing multi-team orgs with both IC engineers and architects (10–40+ headcount)
• Enterprise software domain experience strongly preferred (SaaS, CCaaS, fintech, or similar high-uptime/regulated environments)

Responsibilities

• Define and lead AI-augmented quality initiatives across the organization
• Deploy LLM-powered test generation, triage, and root-cause analysis tooling
• Build frameworks for validating AI/ML model outputs and non-deterministic behaviors
• Architect scalable, maintainable test frameworks across UI, API, and integration layers
• Drive shift-left testing embedded in CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Establish coverage KPIs, flakiness SLAs, and automation ROI metrics
• Lead adoption of self-healing and AI-assisted test maintenance
• Lead performance and load testing strategy at enterprise scale
• Define SLOs/SLAs and partner with SRE on reliability thresholds
• Design continuous performance validation integrated into delivery pipelines
• Drive root-cause analysis for regressions, bottlenecks, and latency spikes
• Oversee toolchain including k6, JMeter, Gatling, and APM integrations
• Lead and grow teams of automation engineers, performance engineers, and architects
• Set technical direction, OKRs, and career ladders for the quality engineering org
• Hire senior ICs and architect-level talent; build succession depth
• Foster a culture of ownership, engineering craft, and continuous learning
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, DevOps, and R&D leadership

Skills

Leadership

Quality engineering

Test automation architecture

AI in software testing

CI/CD

Programming (Python/TS/Java)

Tools

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Datadog

Grafana

New Relic

Job description

NiCE is seeking a visionary engineering leader to architect and drive the quality engineering discipline into the AI era. You will own automation infrastructure, performance engineering, and AI-driven quality initiatives, building and mentoring high-performing teams that set the standard for scalable software validation.

You will disrupt legacy testing paradigms, champion agentic test generation, and embed AI-quality thinking across the SDLC—bridging engineering velocity with product