Role: Testing Leader (Hands-on)
Location - Parsippany, NJ
Experience: 15+ Years
Role Summary
We are seeking a Hands-On Testing Leader who operates across the entire testing lifecycle from defining test strategy and quality architecture, to writing production-grade automation, to leading quality initiatives across cross-functional teams. This role combines technical depth, end-to-end ownership, and stakeholder leadership without requiring people management.
You will drive quality across engineering, product, and architecture teams, build automation systems, and ensure product reliability through measurable quality practices.
Core Responsibilities
- Quality Strategy & Test Leadership
- Define and drive org-level test strategy, including test coverage models, automation maturity, and quality KPIs.
- Lead quality discussions in product and architecture reviews.
- Establish testing standards across layers unit, component, contract, integration, E2E, regression, performance, security, reliability, and accessibility.
- Build quality roadmaps aligning teams around architecture, risk, and release objectives.
- Drive shift-left culture through tools, patterns, and engineering practices.
Technical Ownership & Hands-On Contribution
- Write and maintain automation code (UI/API/service-level).
- Build testing frameworks and utilities for scalable, maintainable, deterministic tests.
- Implement contract testing for microservices using Pact/AsyncAPI schemas.
- Create component/integration testing setups using TestContainers, WireMock, LocalStack, docker-compose.
- Enhance CI/CD pipelines for parallelization, TIA (Test Impact Analysis), test failures diagnostics, and automated reporting.
- Own environment strategy ephemeral test environments, seeded databases, mocks, stubs, and replay systems.
Test Architecture & Infrastructure
- Design test architecture aligned with system architecture (microservices, event-driven, cloud-native).
- Implement quality gates (coverage, mutation, contract verifications, performance SLAs).
- Integrate observability into tests: logs, traces, metrics, failure telemetry.
- Define best practices around test data lifecycle, idempotency, synthetic generation, masking, and PII-safe pipelines.
- Optimize test execution cost, speed, stability, and feedback loops.
Non-Functional Testing Leadership
- Own performance engineering load models, capacity targets, baseline comparisons, regression analysis.
- Establish resilience/fault-injection playbooks to test degradation modes, graceful failures, and failover.
- Ensure security testing integration (DAST/SAST/SCA, dependency scans, SBOM checks).
- Define accessibility standards and integrate automated A11y checks.
Stakeholder Management & Cross-Functional Leadership
- Work closely with Engineering, Product, Architects, DevOps, and Release teams.
- Translate business/customer risks into measurable test strategies.
- Present quality health using dashboards (SLO compliance, defect leakage, test stability, build health).
- Lead incident RCAs and preventive measures; drive systemic improvements.
- Mentor teams on test design, automation patterns, and debugging without direct line management.
Technical Skill Requirements
Languages (strong in one, working knowledge in 1 2):
- Java / Kotlin
- TypeScript / JavaScript
- Python
- C#
Automation Frameworks
- UI: Playwright, Cypress, Selenium
- API/Service: REST Assured, SuperTest, pytest, HTTPX
- Contract: Pact, AsyncAPI, protobuf/Avro schemas
- Integration/Component: TestContainers, WireMock, LocalStack
- Performance: K6, JMeter, Gatling
- Accessibility: axe-core, Pa11y
Cloud, CI/CD, & Infra
- CI: GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps / Jenkins / GitLab CI
- Cloud: AWS / Azure / Google Cloud Platform
- Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
- Feature Flags: LaunchDarkly / Unleash
- Observability: OpenTelemetry, Jaeger/Zipkin, Prometheus, Grafana
Quality & Governance
- Coverage & mutation testing: JaCoCo, Istanbul, PIT
- Security scans: Trivy, Snyk, OWASP ZAP
- SBOM: CycloneDX
- Code quality: SonarQube, ESLint/Detekt
- Test reporting: Allure, ReportPortal, custom dashboards
Experience Required
- 8 14+ years in Software Quality Engineering.
- Proven experience designing test strategy for distributed systems.
- Strong hands-on automation background across UI/API/service layers.
- Experience leading quality initiatives across multiple squads/products.
- Strong communication and stakeholder alignment skills.
- Ability to influence without authority; no formal people management required.
-- Asher Williams Desk: 2o1.497.1o1o X:1o5 | Direct: 551.272.o129 asher (at) pullskill dot com
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