Director of QA, India Engineering

Job Summary The Quality Engineering (QE) organization is the revenue protection infrastructure for Copado, directly enabling "Predictable, Reliable Releases" as a core company objective. This team is globally distributed across India (Jaipur and other sites), Finland (Tampere/Helsinki), Spain (Madrid), and the USA (New Orleans). The core mission is to transform the release process by: - Building an Autonomous Safety Net: Architect and implement robust, AI-driven automated test suites that serve as a proactive safety net against software regression, directly protecting the company's $137M+ Core ARR . - Driving Quality-First CI/CD: Embed quality and compliance via automated gates into CI/CD pipelines to make release days obsolete , accelerate development, and prevent costly L3 escalations. - Enhancing Strategic Value: Act as the driving force for quality in an assigned product area, ensuring every deployment builds customer trust, neutralizes competitive threats, and accelerates the shift toward an autonomous AgentOps platform . Key Responsibilities Success in this role will be measured by the ability to strategically lead the quality organization, define and execute the automation roadmap, and embed a quality-first culture. - Lead & Inspire: Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of Quality Engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement, and championing the adoption of AI-first and API-first testing methodologies. - Drive Hyper-Agility & AI Transformation: Implement an AI-first strategy to achieve hyper-agility across the engineering operation. This includes fostering Dev-QA pairing, abolishing QA as a separate phase, driving Autonomous Testing and utilization of TestAgent tests, focusing on edge cases, enabling Exploratory Testing (ET) on demand, and building AI-powered tools for developers to secure testing. - Architect Automation Strategy: Design and execute the roadmap to achieve 100% test automation across all product lines. The entire Quality Engineering operation must function as the internal initial adopter ("Customer 0") for Copado Robotic Testing (CRT) and AI agents, providing essential feedback to drive their product evolution. - Champion a "Shift-Left" Culture: Drive quality upstream by coaching and empowering developers on best practices for AI-first test automation, API test automation, unit testing, and other development-level quality checks. - Drive Modern Quality Practices: Champion and implement modern DevOps quality standards, including canary releases, incremental rollouts, feature flags, comprehensive logging, and robust error handling. - Enhance Testing Processes: Lead and organize highly effective Exploratory Testing (ET) sessions to uncover complex issues, while continuously optimizing regression testing processes to reduce lead time and accelerate feedback loops. - Measure What Matters: Define, track, and report on key quality metrics (KPIs) such as defect escape rate, test coverage, and customer-reported issues, using this data to drive strategic decisions. - Integrate Security: Partner with the security team to embed and automate security testing practices (e.g., SAST, DAST) within the CI/CD pipeline. Build the Team: Own the complete lifecycle of your organization, including hiring, onboarding, professional development, budget management, maintaining and improving team health, and coaching QA engineers and team leads on growth in their QA career. Qualifications & Experience A. Technical Competencies Category | Competency | Description | 1) Automation & Technical Depth | Extensive Automation Expertise | 7+ years of hands-on experience in software test automation, with deep expertise in building, scaling, and maintaining automation frameworks, including defining and implementing AI-first and API-first test automation strategies. | 2) AI & Innovation | AI-Driven Quality | Demonstrated ability to efficiently utilize AI in testing and quality engineering, translating these capabilities into tangible benefits for the organization, such as defect prediction and autonomous testing. | 3) DevOps & Architecture | DevOps Mindset | Strong understanding of SaaS architectures, CI/CD pipelines, and modern DevOps principles. You do not just test the code; you understand how it gets to production. | 4) Foundational Education | Educational Background | Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. | 5) Bonus | Testing Specialization | Experience within the Salesforce ecosystem, hands-on experience with performance and load testing. A strong background of Robot Framework and Copado Robotic Testing is a big plus. | B. Cultural & Leadership Competencies Category | Competency | Description | 5) Leadership & Management | Proven Leadership | 10+ years of experience of testing in a leadership role (Manager, Director, or Head) with a proven track record of leading and mentoring quality engineering teams in a fast-paced SaaS environment, including leading international testing organizations, and successfully guiding teams to implement AI-first and API-first testing strategies. This includes owning the complete lifecycle of your organization, including hiring, onboarding, professional development, budget management, maintaining and improving team health, and coaching QA engineers and team leads on growth in their QA career. | 6) Strategy | Strategic Vision | Demonstrated ability to develop a long-term quality strategy and vision, including the definition and execution of AI-first and API-first test automation strategies, and to execute it successfully within an agile engineering organization. | 7) Collaboration & Influence | Collaborative Influence | Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and coach developers on quality best practices. | 8) Data Literacy | Data-Driven Approach | Experience using metrics and data to analyze performance, identify opportunities, and drive process improvements. |