Director, Quality Engineering and Automation

Director of Quality Engineering and Automation

EmpiRx Health is the leading clinically-driven pharmacy benefits management company. As the pioneer in value-based pharmacy care, EmpiRx Health puts its customers and members first by enabling them to take control of their pharmacy benefits, healthcare outcomes, and financial results.

We place more emphasis on member care than any other PBM by focusing on health outcomes first. Our pharmacists and clinicians are at the center of everything we do―and our population health solution delivers tailored strategies for our clients. Leveraging our newly launched, AI-powered pharmacy care platform, Clinically ™ , EmpiRx Health’s pharmacists and client experience teams provide the highest quality pharmacy care to our clients and their members. This enables benefits plan sponsors to keep their members healthy, happy, and productive, while substantially reducing prescription drug spending, which has been on an explosive growth trajectory in recent years.

EmpiRx Health is building a quality-first engineering culture, and we are seeking a Director or Senior Director of Quality Engineering and Automation to lead this transformation. This role will establish standards and operating practices for quality across application and data engineering while ensuring that SDETs are embedded in and accountable to the Scrum teams they serve. This is not a conventional QA role or a centralized automation factory. We are looking for a hands-on player-coach who can diagnose the highest-value quality risks on each team, help teams address those risks early, and influence product and engineering leadership to make quality part of how we build and release software and data products.

As the Director / Senior Director of Quality Engineering and Automation, you will establish a modern Quality Engineering (QE) strategy, influence product and engineering leadership, and lead our cultural shift toward engineering-led quality. You will directly manage and coach SDETs, while ensuring they work as integrated members of the Scrum teams they serve. Product owners and Scrum teams will prioritize their day-to-day work against stories, sprint commitments, and delivery needs; you will set quality direction, standards, guardrails, and the sequence of cross-team quality improvements. You will help teams apply the right practices for their context, from application testing and release validation to data pipeline, transformation, schema, reconciliation, and lineage testing. The role begins with engineering, with expansion to operations considered later as quality maturity and capacity allow.

This role requires a hands-on leader who works natively with AI and agentic development and can apply it to quality engineering, from agent-assisted test generation to automated validation and release pipelines, backed by expertise in software quality practices, automation frameworks, data validation, DevOps methodologies, and Agile delivery models. AI and automation should be applied pragmatically: first understand each team’s quality risks and then use the most effective combination of engineering practices, automation, and AI to improve coverage, feedback, and release confidence.

Key Responsibilities:

Define and Implement Quality Engineering Strategies

• Establish and evangelize a quality-first mindset across engineering.
• Assess quality maturity, defect patterns, failure modes, and delivery risks for each team, then prioritize quality improvements based on risk, customer impact, and engineering value.
• Define unit testing, integration testing, and automation strategies.
• Assist the organization in adopting appropriate testing strategies; which may include test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), and shift-left testing practices.
• Develop a comprehensive test automation strategy for regression and UAT testing.
• Ensure alignment between engineering, DevOps, CI/CD, and data processing workflows.
• Define data quality standards to ensure high accuracy, consistency, and integrity from ingestion through transformation, pipeline execution, and gold-level data storage, including Databricks declarative pipelines.
• Establish standards for validating AI-generated code and tests, including coverage, correctness, and traceability back to requirements or specifications.
• Define governance and guardrails for the responsible use of AI in testing, including data privacy, auditability, and compliance considerations.

Influence and Elevate Engineering Standards

• Work with senior leadership to establish short-term, mid-term, and long-term quality objectives.
• Act as a thought leader within engineering, influencing teams to adopt quality engineering and data validation best practices.
• Work with engineering and product leaders to embed quality as a fundamental principle.
• Partner with product owners and Scrum teams to identify quality risks, make quality work visible in team backlogs, and align day-to-day quality work with sprint priorities.
• Lead and coach SDETs as embedded members of Scrum teams, maintaining consistent quality standards while ensuring they deliver value to the teams they serve.
• Establish quality metrics, reporting, and governance to measure engineering and data processing quality.
• Drive adoption of defect tracking, data validation, and quality monitoring tools.
• Work with engineering leadership to establish team standards for quality roles and expectations.

Lead Automation and Testing Innovation

• Define and implement an automation-forward, risk-based testing strategy across all levels of testing, using automation and AI where they improve coverage, feedback, and release confidence.
• Establish best practices for API testing, performance testing, security testing, and exploratory testing.
• Partner with engineering and data teams to integrate automated testing within CI/CD and data pipelines.
• Ensure data validation, schema enforcement, and lineage tracking are incorporated throughout the data lifecycle.
• Evolve our existing AI-augmented test automation ecosystems that include (but are not limited to) Playwright, RESTSharp, Reqnroll/Cucumber and NUnit along with data validation tools like Great Expectations and dbt tests.
• Evaluate and refine AI-assisted test case development and validation so that it addresses the highest-value quality risks for each team.
• Lead the standards for reporting and analytics testing frameworks to ensure data-driven insights maintain accuracy and reliability.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in software quality engineering, data validation, test automation, and DevOps.
• Proven track record of leading quality engineering transformations at scale.
• Strong knowledge of modern testing frameworks, automation strategies, and data quality best practices.
• Experience defining unit, integration, regression, UAT testing, and data validation standards.
• Expertise in CI/CD pipelines, test orchestration, DevOps practices, and data processing pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with test automation tools and data quality frameworks.
• Experience working in Agile, Scrum, and Kanban development environments.
• Strong ability to influence engineering and product leadership and drive change.
• Hands-on experience with agentic development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, and the ability to apply them to quality engineering, test automation, and CI/CD workflows.
• Experience with cloud-native testing strategies across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP.
• Experience leading as a hands-on player-coach, developing direct reports while contributing directly to technical work.
• Experience leading or partnering with SDETs embedded in Agile/Scrum teams and aligning quality work with product backlogs and sprint priorities.
• Experience with data engineering principles, medallion architecture validation, data quality, and data governance best practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in highly regulated industries (healthcare, fintech, insurance, etc.).
• Hands-on experience with performance testing tools.
• Exposure to security testing methodologies.

Work Environment: Remote

Benefits And Perks

Subject to program eligibility, this position qualifies for a robust suite of benefits including: Paid Time Off, a 401(k) program, Health Insurance including Dental & Vision coverage, Health Savings Account, and an Employee Assistance Program.

EmpiRx Health is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At EmpiRx Health, we wholeheartedly embrace the power of diversity and the magic of inclusion. The kaleidoscope of unique perspectives, backgrounds, and talents fuels our innovation and sets us apart. We're on a mission to build a team as diverse as the world we serve, where everyone is welcome and celebrated. We're not just breaking down barriers; we're actively erasing them to create an environment where opportunity knows no bounds. In unity, we find our strength and invite individuals from all walks of life to join us in our exhilarating journey to shape a brighter, more inclusive future together.

Note: This job description is a general outline of responsibilities and qualifications for the role. Additional duties may be assigned, and the position may evolve to meet the organization's needs.Top of Form