Quality Engineering Practice Lead

Role Overview

Our client, a technology solutions organization, is seeking a Practice Lead – Quality Engineering (QE) to establish and scale a modern quality engineering practice across the organization.

This leadership role focuses on transforming traditional quality assurance approaches into engineering-led quality practices. The Practice Lead will drive the adoption of automation, Agile, DevOps, continuous testing, and emerging AI-enabled testing approaches to embed quality across the entire software development lifecycle. The role also plays a key part in strengthening delivery excellence, developing scalable service offerings, and supporting commercial growth through high-quality engineering practices.

Key Responsibilities

Practice Strategy & Leadership

• Define and execute the strategy, roadmap, and operating model for the Quality Engineering practice in alignment with business and technology objectives.
• Champion modern quality engineering practices that emphasize proactive quality enablement, risk management, and continuous improvement.
• Serve as a subject matter leader in emerging quality engineering trends, including AI-driven testing, shift-left and shift-right testing approaches, and continuous testing methodologies.

Capability & Offering Development

• Develop and standardize frameworks, methodologies, tools, and accelerators for quality engineering across areas such as automation testing, performance testing, security testing, and reliability engineering.
• Build and enhance service offerings that support automated testing, CI/CD quality gates, API testing, data and AI testing, and observability-based quality practices.
• Establish maturity models, reusable assets, reference architectures, and best practices to support scalable delivery.

Delivery Excellence & Governance

• Ensure consistent and high-quality quality engineering practices across projects and client engagements.
• Define governance structures, performance metrics, and key indicators such as defect leakage, automation coverage, release cycle time, and overall quality risk.
• Provide oversight and leadership support for complex or high-risk delivery engagements.

Talent Development & Capability Building

• Build and scale high-performing quality engineering teams and communities of practice.
• Define role frameworks, competency models, skill matrices, and professional development pathways.
• Mentor delivery leaders, architects, and engineers in modern quality engineering practices.

Client & Stakeholder Engagement

• Collaborate with internal and external stakeholders to position quality engineering as a strategic enabler of product quality, resilience, and customer experience.
• Lead discussions related to quality engineering transformation initiatives, maturity assessments, and roadmap development.
• Support pre-sales activities including solution design, proposal development, effort estimation, and executive presentations.

Commercial & Practice Growth

• Contribute to revenue growth through the development of new quality engineering services and the expansion of existing accounts.
• Improve delivery efficiency and margins through automation, standardization, and productivity improvements.
• Monitor practice-level financial performance, utilization, and investment priorities.

Qualifications

Required

• At least 12 years of experience in Quality Engineering, Software Testing, or Software Engineering.
• Minimum 5 years in a leadership role, including experience building or scaling engineering practices.
• Strong expertise in test automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, Agile and DevOps environments, and cloud-native architectures.
• Demonstrated experience leading quality engineering transformation initiatives across large-scale digital platforms or enterprise systems.
• Proven ability to build and scale teams, delivery models, and service offerings.
• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills.

Preferred

• Experience with AI-driven testing, test data management, performance engineering, and security testing.
• Background working within consulting or technology services environments.
• Professional certifications related to software testing, Agile, DevOps, or cloud platforms.

Success Measures

• Success in this role may be evaluated based on:
• Adoption and maturity of quality engineering practices across delivery teams
• Improvements in quality metrics such as release velocity and defect leakage
• Growth in quality engineering–related revenue and client satisfaction
• Development of a strong talent pipeline and community of quality engineering practitioners