Director, Quality Engineering

Director, Quality Engineering (Automation & Quality Engineering)

Join Starr, a global leader in commercial insurance with over a century of expertise. We empower our employees to innovate, make impactful decisions, and build lasting client relationships worldwide. At Starr, you'll work in an entrepreneurial culture alongside accessible leaders, leveraging our financial strength and vast industry experience to deliver solutions for our clients, no matter how complex. Grow your career with a rapidly growing company that invests in its people and their ability to drive real progress.

Location: New York, NY / Philadelphia, PA / Atlanta, GA

Department: Starr Technology Group

Role Overview

The Director, Quality Engineering is responsible for leading and managing Starr's automation-first Quality Engineering, ensuring consistent delivery of high-quality technology solutions across all business and technology initiatives. This role provides strategic and operational leadership for quality assurance, test management, release readiness, and quality governance practices across the software development lifecycle.

The Director will oversee distributed teams of Quality Engineering Managers, Test Leads, Automation Engineers, and Quality Analysts while partnering closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Business, and Delivery leaders to establish and execute quality strategies that align with organizational objectives.

This leader will drive quality excellence through effective test planning, execution management, process standardization, quality metrics, risk management, and continuous improvement initiatives. The role requires strong leadership, organizational management, stakeholder engagement, and extensive experience in Quality Engineering within the Property & Casualty Insurance industry.

Key Responsibilities

Quality Engineering Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and develop a global Quality Engineering organization including QE Managers, Test Leads, Test Engineers, and Automation Specialists; provide direct oversight, set clear goals, and support professional development.
• Define and execute enterprise-wide Quality Engineering and Test Automation strategies aligned with digital transformation and cloud modernization initiatives.
• Establish automation as the default testing approach across functional, integration, API, data, performance, and regression testing.
• Drive organizational adoption of modern QE practices including shift-left testing, shift-right validation, continuous testing, and quality observability.
• Build a high-performance engineering culture focused on innovation, automation, accountability, and measurable quality outcomes.

Automation Strategy & Engineering Excellence

• Own the architecture, design, implementation, and continuous improvement of enterprise test automation frameworks and reusable quality platforms.
• Drive automation across web, API, data, microservices, event-driven, and cloud-native applications.
• Establish intelligent test automation capabilities leveraging AI-assisted test generation, self-healing automation frameworks, predictive quality analytics, and risk-based testing approaches.
• Develop scalable QE platforms that enable teams to rapidly create, execute, and maintain automated tests with minimal manual intervention.
• Standardize automation frameworks, coding standards, test design patterns, and engineering best practices across all technology domains.
• Partner with Engineering and DevOps leaders to implement automated quality gates within CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows.

Quality Governance & Risk Management

• Define and monitor key Quality Engineering metrics, including: Automation coverage, Automated execution rates, Defect escape rates, Release quality scores, Mean time to detect and resolve defects, Test execution efficiency, CI/CD quality gate compliance, Production incident reduction.
• Utilize data-driven insights and predictive analytics to identify quality risks, bottlenecks, and opportunities for optimization.
• Develop executive-level quality dashboards that provide transparency into application health, release readiness, and automation maturity.
• Drive measurable improvements in software quality, release predictability, and engineering productivity.

Innovation, AI & Continuous Improvement

• Champion adoption of emerging quality engineering technologies including Generative AI, machine learning-based test generation, autonomous testing, and intelligent quality platforms.
• Lead enterprise initiatives to reduce manual testing effort through automation, reusable assets, and engineering enablement practices.
• Continuously evaluate and modernize quality engineering tools, frameworks, and processes to improve scalability and effectiveness.
• Establish communities of practice, training programs, and engineering standards that promote innovation and knowledge sharing across teams.
• Drive root cause analysis initiatives and systemic quality improvements to eliminate recurring production defects.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field (master's preferred).
• 12+ years' experience in software quality engineering or QA, with at least 5+ years in management roles leading distributed teams.
• Experience with hands-on QE within P&C Insurance industry is required.
• Strong expertise in building, scaling, and overseeing QE operations—including automation frameworks, SDLC integration, and test management.
• Strong hands-on experience with automation technologies such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Tosca, Appium, Postman, Rest Assured, Karate, JMeter, and performance engineering tools.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GitLab, or similar platforms.
• Proven track record driving automation adoption and measurable improvements in quality KPIs.
• Excellent people leadership, team building, and stakeholder engagement skills.
• Deep understanding of industry standards for security, compliance, and data privacy as they relate to QE.
• Experience managing teams in a global delivery model.
• Knowledge of data quality assurance, cloud migration, and digital transformation initiatives.

Starr is an equal opportunity employer, which means we'll consider all suitably qualified applicants regardless of gender identity or expression, ethnic origin, nationality, religion or beliefs, age, sexual orientation, disability status or any other protected characteristic. We recruit and develop our people based on merit and we're committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We offer first class training and development opportunities to all employees. Our aim is to grow our own talent and bring out the best in people.