Job Summary:
Join us as a senior Quality leader supporting Professional Services programs across Retail customers.
The Software Quality Director (Professional Services – Retail) owns the end-to-end quality strategy and execution for customer-facing programs, ensuring releases are reliable, scalable, secure, and operationally ready for real-world retail environments. You will operate as a trusted advisor to customer leadership and internal executives—aligning quality plans to business use cases, requirements, store operations, and rollout objectives.
This role sets the vision for scalable quality engineering, modern test automation, performance validation, and AI-enabled test planning/execution. You will lead QA managers and partner closely with Professional Services, Product, Engineering, Support, Security, and Customer Success to ensure quality is measurable, transparent, and outcome-driven.
Key Responsibilities:
Customer leadership partnership (Retail Professional Services)
- Serve as a high-level quality advisor to customer leadership (e.g., VP/Director of IT, Operations, Store Systems), aligning on success metrics, risks, rollout readiness, and operational acceptance criteria.
- Translate business objectives (store uptime, transaction integrity, associate productivity, inventory accuracy, rollout timelines) into test strategies and release gates.
- Lead joint customer/internal reviews on quality status, defect trends, go/no-go readiness, and post-release learnings.
Quality strategy focused on business outcomes
- Define and drive a QA strategy that is anchored in retail business use cases, workflows, and operational scenarios—not just process compliance.
- Ensure requirements are testable, traceable, and aligned to customer value (e.g., POS flows, promotions, loyalty, back office, device workflows, integrations).
- Build practical quality governance that complements Agile delivery while prioritizing operational reliability and measurable outcomes.
AI-enabled test planning and execution
- Incorporate AI to accelerate test design, scenario generation, risk-based prioritization, test data creation, defect clustering, and regression selection.
- Establish standards to ensure AI-assisted testing is explainable, secure, auditable, and improves coverage/efficiency without sacrificing rigor.
Modern quality engineering & automation
- Scale automation across UI/API/integration layers; expand continuous testing in CI/CD with clear quality gates.
- Drive performance, reliability, and scale validation aligned to retail peak periods and store/network variability.
- Strengthen test environments, test data management, observability, and release readiness playbooks.
Leadership & capability building
- Lead, mentor, and grow QA leaders and engineers across functional, automated, performance, and systems testing.
- Embed with delivery teams when needed to model best practices and unblock quality risks.
- Establish consistent metrics (defect leakage, escaped defects, coverage, cycle time, reliability, customer incidents) and use them to drive improvement.
Duties & Deliverables
- Develop and maintain quality roadmaps aligned to Professional Services program plans and customer rollout waves.
- Create risk-based test strategies covering functional, integration, system, regression, performance, usability, and operational readiness.
- Author/review lifecycle deliverables: customer-facing quality plans, test reports, traceability, release readiness criteria, and risk assessments.
- Ensure defect management discipline: triage, prioritization aligned to business impact, and closure transparency.
- Partner with Security to incorporate cybersecurity and risk assessments appropriate for retail deployments.
- Own the quality tooling ecosystem: requirements/test management, CI pipelines, reporting dashboards, and test environments.
Must Have Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience.
- 10+ years in software quality assurance / quality engineering, including automation and test strategy ownership.
- 8+ years leading teams/managers; demonstrated ability to scale practices across multiple initiatives.
- Strong customer-facing leadership experience—able to communicate with and influence customer executives and internal senior leaders (SVP/CTO-level).
- Proven ability to drive quality based on business use cases, requirements clarity, and operational workflows.
- Experience delivering B2B and/or B2C software in production environments with uptime and performance expectations.
- Expertise with SDLC tooling (requirements, CI/CD, test management, defect tracking) and metrics-driven quality management.
- Excellent communication skills (written and verbal); able to produce clear customer-ready plans and executive updates.
Preferred:
- Retail domain experience (POS, payments, promotions, loyalty, store systems, peripherals, integrations).
- Hands-on experience applying AI/ML tools to testing (scenario generation, risk prioritization, regression optimization, defect analytics).
- Programming/scripting experience (e.g., Python, JavaScript, Java, C#) and modern automation frameworks.
- Experience in regulated/validated environments and traceability documentation (a plus, not required).
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