Director of Quality Engineering

Acumen Fiscal Agent; Mesa, Northern (AZ, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Acumen Fiscal Agent is seeking a Director of Quality Engineering to lead the transformation of software quality from traditional QA to a modern QE capability. You will drive automation across CI/CD, establish risk-based testing, and partner with engineering and product teams to improve release confidence and speed.

The role requires 10+ years in software quality or engineering leadership, strong automation expertise, and familiarity with AI tools applied to testing and delivery workflows.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering or software quality engineering with leadership responsibility.
• Transforming manual QA into an automation-oriented quality capability.
• Strong technical depth in automated testing architectures, APIs, CI/CD, cloud apps.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the enterprise Quality Engineering strategy, standards, and roadmap.
• Embed quality throughout discovery, requirements, design, development, and release processes.
• Establish a risk-based quality framework aligned to business impact and production risk.
• Build an automation-first testing capability across unit, API, integration, regression, and performance testing integrated into CI/CD.
• Apply AI tooling to accelerate test generation, regression analysis, and release-readiness assessment.
• Establish quality gates, release-confidence criteria, metrics, and feedback loops across testing and incidents.
• Collaborate with Software Engineering, Product, Cloud & Platform, and Information Security to improve testability and secure delivery.
• Develop the internal QE team and establish engineering standards and career expectations.

Skills

Quality leadership

Quality engineering

Automation

CI/CD

AI in testing

Cloud

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

CI/CD tooling

Selenium

Test automation frameworks

Job description

Position Summary

Lead the evolution of software quality from traditional QA into a modern Quality Engineering capability that improves release confidence, development velocity, automation, and shared accountability for quality across Product and Engineering.

Director, Quality Engineering

Lead the evolution of software quality from traditional QA into a modern Quality Engineering capability that improves release confidence, development velocity, automation, and shared accountability for quality across Product and Engineering.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Define and execute the enterprise Quality Engineering strategy, operating model, standards, and roadmap.
• Embed quality throughout discovery, requirements, design, development, and release processes, including strong acceptance criteria and early risk identification.
• Establish a risk-based quality framework that aligns testing depth and methods to business impact, technical complexity, customer workflows, integrations, and production risk.
• Build an automation-first testing capability across unit, API, integration, regression, performance, and end-to-end testing, integrated directly into CI/CD pipelines.
• Apply AI and agentic tooling to accelerate test generation, exploratory testing, regression analysis, defect investigation, test maintenance, and release-readiness assessment.
• Establish meaningful quality gates, release-confidence criteria, metrics, and feedback loops spanning testing, escaped defects, production incidents, and corrective action.
• Partner with Software Engineering, Product, Cloud & Platform Engineering, and Information Security to improve testability, resilience, observability, and secure delivery.
• Develop the internal QE team, retain critical domain knowledge, establish engineering standards and career expectations, and use contractors strategically.

Background & Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering, software quality engineering, test automation, or related experience, including significant leadership responsibility.
• Demonstrated experience transforming manual or downstream QA into an engineering-led, automation-oriented quality capability.
• Strong technical depth in automated testing architectures, APIs, integration testing, CI/CD, cloud applications, and modern test frameworks.
• Experience developing risk-based testing strategies for complex, integrated, or high-consequence software systems.
• Strong understanding of Agile/software-development practices and shared accountability for quality.
• High proficiency with modern AI tools and frontier models, with demonstrated ability to apply AI safely and productively to testing, automation, analysis, engineering workflows, and team productivity.
• Experience in healthcare, financial services, regulated technology, or another high-consequence environment preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience.