QA Automation Lead/Project Manager

Job Description

Position - QA Automation Lead/Project Manager

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Location - Raritan, New Jersey

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Duration - Full-time

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Key responsibilities

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Delivery and planning

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• Own the end-to-end delivery plan across 3–6 concurrent workstreams, from initiation and scoping through build, test, release and hypercare.
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• Run delivery across the full SDLC in Agile (Scrum/Kanban), waterfall or hybrid models, choosing the right approach per workstream.
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• Build and maintain an integrated plan with milestones, critical path and cross-team dependencies (for example, a data pipeline that must land before a model can be trained or a dashboard released).
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• Run sprint ceremonies or delivery cadences with team leads; keep backlogs groomed and ready.
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Scope, risk and governance

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• Maintain the RAID log (risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies) and escalate early with options, not just problems.
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• Control scope through a clear change process; quantify impact on timeline, cost and quality before changes are accepted.
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• Track budget and resource use, including cloud and Databricks consumption against forecast, with the platform lead.
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• Ensure release readiness: test sign-off, security and data governance checks, deployment and rollback plans.
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Stakeholders and communication

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• Be the single point of accountability for delivery status to sponsors and business owners.
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• Produce weekly status reports and monthly steering committee packs with RAG status, decisions needed and trade-offs.
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• Translate technical constraints into business impact, and business priorities into clear asks for engineering.
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• Coordinate with vendors and partners where work is outsourced.
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Team and continuous improvement

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• Remove blockers and resolve cross-team conflicts on priority and capacity.
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• Run retrospectives and post-release reviews; turn lessons into changes in process.
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• Maintain delivery tooling (Jira/Azure DevOps, Confluence) as the source of truth.
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Must-have qualifications

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• 6+ years managing IT or software projects, with at least 3 years running multiple workstreams or a programme at the same time.
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• Strong command of the SDLC: requirements, design, build, test (unit, integration, UAT), release and support.
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• Hands-on experience with Agile delivery and hybrid models; able to plan to fixed milestones while teams work in sprints.
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• Proven dependency and critical-path management across engineering teams that do not report to you.
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• Track record of delivering to time and budget, with examples you can quantify (team size, budget, timeline, outcome).
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• Clear written and verbal communication with both engineers and senior business stakeholders, including steering committee reporting.
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• Proficiency with Jira or Azure DevOps, Confluence, and MS Project or Smartsheet.
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• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business or equivalent experience.
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• PMP, PRINCE2, PMI-ACP, CSM or SAFe certification preferred.
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Nice-to-have technical knowledge

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You do not need to build on these platforms. You need enough working knowledge to plan realistically, ask the right questions and spot risk early.

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Area

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Expected level

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What that looks like in practice

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Databricks

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Working knowledge (important)

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Understands workspaces, notebooks, jobs/workflows, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog and the medallion (bronze/silver/gold) pattern; knows how cluster and job costs accrue; can follow a pipeline design discussion

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AWS

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Basic

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Familiar with core services (S3, IAM, EC2, VPC, Lambda) and how environments (dev/test/prod) are set up; understands why access, networking and security reviews take lead time

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AI / ML

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Basic

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Understands the model lifecycle (data prep, training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring), MLflow, and GenAI concepts such as LLMs, RAG and prompt evaluation; knows why AI work needs time for experimentation and data quality

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Product development

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Basic

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• Has worked alongside product managers on roadmaps, MVP scoping, user stories and acceptance criteria; can tell a scope change from a refinement
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