Quality Assurance Manager

The Opportunity We're looking for a world class QA Manager who leads from the front. We're not looking for a test manager. We're looking for a leader to own quality assurance broadly across a modern .NET/Angular/SQL SaaS running on Azure, who will evolve our Playwright-based automation, and embed AI agents to make testing smarter, faster, and self-healing. You'll manage a blended team of automation and manual engineers and stay hands-on enough to debug pipelines, review code, and unblock your team. Salary: $155,000 - 210,000 USD per month What You'll Own Strategy & Forward-Looking Roadmap Define a 12–18 month quality roadmap that balances speed, coverage, and cost AI-assisted workflows, test generation from production logs, flaky-test auto-quarantine, visual AI diffing, and predictive risk-based test selection Shift quality left (design/PR reviews) and right (production observability, canary monitoring) Establish quality SLOs (flakiness Hands-On Technical Leadership Architect test frameworks that scale across microservices and Angular frontends Design SQL test data strategies, synthetic data, anonymized production clones, and on-demand seed scripts Optimize CI/CD quality gates in Azure DevOps with intelligent parallelization Leverage Azure services for test infrastructure, containerized test runners, scale sets, and cloud-hosted agent pools Team & Delivery Optimization Manage and mentor 5–10 engineers (mix of automation SDETs and manual testers) Upskill manual engineers into automation engineers within 6–9 months via pair-coding and structured learning Implement RCA (Root Cause Analysis) discipline, blameless postmortems that drive systemic fixes, not band-aids Optimize for maximum delivery velocity, know when to cut, defer, or automate tests based on risk and ROI Metrics & Continuous Improvement Define and track: defect escape rate, MTTR, flakiness %, test pass rate per build, and pipeline reliability Build executive dashboards that translate quality into business metrics (revenue protected, incidents avoided) Run quarterly quality audits to reassess tooling, processes, and team composition What You Bring 8+ years in QA/QE, with 3+ years managing a hybrid (manual + automation) team in a SaaS environment Deep hands-on experience with Playwright (UI + API) and modern JS/TS testing patterns Strong understanding of .NET (C#) backend and Angular frontend architectures—enough to debug failures and guide testability Solid SQL skills, able to write complex queries for data validation, test seeding, and reporting Proven experience integrating tests into CI/CD pipelines with quality gates Track record of implementing AI/ML in testing, even if experimental, with clear outcomes Data-driven decision-maker, you use metrics to optimize, not just report Hands-on enough to jump into a flaky test or pipeline failure personally Coach-first, you grow people, not just processes Blameless, collaborative, you partner with devs, product, and ops as equals How to Stand Out Share a 1-pager with us: One metric you'd change and why A specific RCA you led that changed the system, not just the test A case study or before/after snapshot of a team or process you optimized, include baseline metrics, what you did, and the outcomes achieved