Global Quality Engineering & Release Lead

AXIS (AXIS Capital); New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical plans

Retirement plans

Tuition reimbursement

Paid vacation

Job summary

AXIS Capital is seeking an Enterprise Test & Quality Lead to own testing across development, QA, UAT, and release activities. You will define the test strategy, coordinate multiple delivery teams, and ensure releases meet quality and business acceptance criteria.

You will embed automated testing within the SDLC, manage test data governance, and drive strategic QA improvements in a regulated, enterprise environment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in Test Management, QA leadership, or quality engineering leadership within complex technology delivery environments.
• Strong understanding of end-to-end software testing practices across unit, integration, system, regression, data lineage and user acceptance testing.
• Experience managing testing in agile delivery environments with multiple concurrent teams and shared environments.
• Practical knowledge of test automation and engineering-led strategy and tooling, ideally including Tosca or comparable platforms, especially AI-driven technologies and processes.
• Strong understanding of environment management and test data management, including handling of sensitive data in non-production environments.
• Ability to define quality gates, release readiness criteria, and structured defect management processes.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across engineering, QA, product, operations, and business teams.
• Excellent planning, coordination, and communication skills, with the ability to manage competing priorities and delivery risk.
• Experience in regulated or control-conscious environments is highly desirable.
• Experience of integrating testing into DevOps pipelines and familiarity with release orchestration and production validation techniques.
• Experience of operating in SAFe (scaled agile) frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end test management lifecycle across Unit Testing, System Integration Testing, QA, UAT, regression testing, and release readiness.
• Define and drive a Quality Engineering strategy embedding automated testing across the SDLC including "shift-left" and "shift-right" practices.
• Define and maintain the overall test strategy, test plans, phase entry and exit criteria, acceptance thresholds, and defect management approach. Work and align with incumbent vendor to align QA to this overall strategy.
• Define and enforce automated quality gates within CI/CD pipelines.
• Coordinate testing across multiple concurrent scrum teams, ensuring alignment of delivery schedules, dependencies, and release milestones.
• Define an environment strategy that enables parallel team execution, minimizes contention, and supports continuous testing.
• Ownership of Test Data Governance Framework.
• Ensure adherence and support from DPO / IRM / Privacy.
• Own the approach to Test Data Management, including data readiness, lineage, masking or obfuscation controls, and interim solutions required to support testing safely and effectively.
• Partner with QA leads to define test scenarios, test cases, regression coverage, and the appropriate level of automation, including use of tools such as Tosca to deliver ROI driven automation, decisions on what to automate and coverage targets.
• KPI Management of QA vendor.
• SLA tracking.
• Capability and skill matrix optimization.
• Trend analysis of defect origin (code, data, environment, design) leading to systemic issue elimination.
• Work with Product Owners and business stakeholders to secure UAT participation, define UAT scripts and acceptance criteria, and manage UAT execution to completion.
• The Test Manager should be a critical input into the release management go / no go stage gate decisions.
• Manage defect triage, retest cycles, and regression planning to ensure efficient resolution and minimal disruption to completed testing.
• Provide decision grade insights on test progress, risks, defect trends, environment readiness, and overall release confidence to project and executive stakeholders.
• Drive continuous improvement in test practices, with a focus on moving from reactive or waterfall‑like testing toward a more agile, disciplined, and scalable operating model.
• Define and oversee post‑release validation strategies, including observability, monitoring, and production quality feedback loops.

Skills

Test management

QA leadership

End-to-end testing

Agile / SAFe

Test automation

Tosca

Test data management

Stakeholder management

Release readiness

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT/Engineering

ISTQB Advanced Test Manager or equivalent desirable

Tools

Tosca

Job description

AXIS Capital is seeking an Enterprise Test & Quality Lead to own testing across development, QA, UAT, and release activities. You will define the test strategy, coordinate multiple delivery teams, and ensure releases meet quality and business acceptance criteria.

You will embed automated testing within the SDLC, manage test data governance, and drive strategic QA improvements in a regulated, enterprise environment.