Director of QA: Lead Automation & Release for AI Platform

Hamilton Barnes; California; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Health benefits

Hybrid work Santa Clara

Job summary

Hamilton Barnes Associates Limited is seeking a Director of QA to build and lead the quality function as the company scales its product and engineering organisation. You will own QA strategy, tooling, test automation, release quality and processes while coaching a high-performing team.

The role partners with the VP of Engineering and focuses on reliability and customer experience for a fast-growing AI infrastructure platform, with a hybrid work model based in Santa Clara.

Qualifications

• Led QA organizations at a software company shipping complex enterprise or infrastructure software.
• Built and scaled QA teams, hiring managers and establishing distributed testing.
• Strong background in test automation, CI/CD integration and modern QA tooling.
• Deep understanding of Agile/Scrum delivery and QA's role in fast releases.
• Ability to partner with engineering leadership as a peer.
• Metrics-driven approach to improve quality metrics and release readiness.

Responsibilities

• Own the overall QA strategy across manual, automated, performance and release testing.
• Build and grow the QA organization, with coaching and development of engineers and managers.
• Embed quality into the development lifecycle from design through release.
• Drive test automation coverage, CI/CD integration and tooling for predictable shipping.
• Define and track quality metrics, escape rate, coverage, MTTR, and release stability.
• Own release readiness and lead post-release quality reviews.
• Collaborate with Customer Success to close the loop between field issues and product quality.

Skills

QA leadership

QA team scaling

Test automation

CI/CD integration

QA tooling

Agile/Scrum

Leadership collaboration

Metrics-driven

Job description

Looking for a role with plenty of growth opportunities?

Join a leading provider of network automation and multi-tenancy solutions for AI infrastructure, supporting high-growth neoclouds, sovereign AI cloud providers, AI factories, and leading AI platform providers. The organisation delivers a widely deployed platform that enables reliable and scalable AI cloud networking.

This opportunity is for a Director of QA to build and lead the quality function as the company scales its product and engineering organisation. Working closely with the VP of Engineering, you'll own QA strategy, tooling, test automation, release quality, and processes while building and coaching a high-performing team. The role directly supports the reliability and customer experience of a fast-growing AI infrastructure platform.

Looking for a role with plenty of growth opportunities?

Responsibilities:

• Own the overall QA strategy: manual, automated, performance, and release testing across the platform
• Build, lead, and grow the QA organization, hiring, coaching, and developing engineers and managers as the team scales
• Partner with the VP of Engineering and engineering leadership to embed quality into the development lifecycle, from design through release
• Drive test automation coverage, CI/CD integration, and the tooling that lets engineering ship predictably
• Define and track engineering quality metrics, escape rate, coverage, MTTR, release stability and use them to drive continuous improvement
• Own release readiness: sign off on quality for each release and lead post-release quality reviews
• Partner with Customer Success and Support to close the loop between field-reported issues and product quality

Skills/Must Have:

• Have led QA organizations at a software company shipping complex enterprise or infrastructure software
• Experience building and scaling QA teams, including hiring managers and setting up global or distributed testing functions
• Strong background in test automation, CI/CD integration, and modern QA tooling
• Deep understanding of Agile/Scrum delivery and how QA fits into fast release cadences
• Ability to partner effectively with engineering leadership as a peer, not just a downstream function
• Metrics-driven you know which numbers matter and how to move them
• Comfortable working from the Santa Clara office on a hybrid basis

Desirable Skills:

• Experience in networking, cloud infrastructure, virtualization, or data center software
• Exposure to network operating systems, SDN, or AI/GPU infrastructure
• Background at both a large infrastructure company (Cisco, Juniper, Arista, VMware, Palo Alto Networks, or similar) and a venture-backed startup

Benefits:

• Competitive base salary, meaningful equity, and standard US benefits package. Hybrid working out of Santa Clara, CA.

Salary:

• Competitive base + equity