Team Lead – QA Testing & Operational Support

Description 1 Position Summary The Team Lead QA Testing and Operational Support is a critical, dual-functioning leadership role designed to bridge the gap between day-to-day production stability, strategic capacity planning, and rigorous application quality assurance. You will lead a dedicated team of QA testers and application support specialists tasked with maintaining and monitoring system health, managing a complex multi-channel incident lifecycle, and ensuring flawless software delivery. Beyond day-to-day triage and testing facilitation, this role carries a vital portfolio-planning responsibility. You will actively collaborate with the Software Portfolio Manager (SPM) to provide project support operations estimates for new project work, as well as ongoing maintenance support projections for applications currently in active development. Simultaneously, you will drive operational alignments across both internal business customers and the Custom Software Solutions group, utilizing Service Now incident management, GitHub and GitLab to ensure seamless traceability across the entire delivery pipeline. Key Responsibilities 1. Operations Estimating & Portfolio Planning (SPM Alignment) • Operational Forecasting: Develop, refine, and deliver comprehensive project support operations estimates for upcoming net-new project initiatives to the Software Portfolio Manager (SPM). • In-Development Maintenance Planning: Analyze applications currently in the development pipeline to forecast ongoing maintenance support models, resource capacity requirements, and long-term operational footprints. • Level of Effort (LOE) Modeling: Formulate testing effort and operational resource estimates for upcoming sprints, releases, and large-scale deployments to ensure appropriate staffing levels within the portfolio. 2. Multi-Channel Incident Triage & Operational Support (ServiceNow) • Serve as the primary operational gatekeeper and escalation point for all incoming production support incidents housed within ServiceNow. • Internal Customer Intake: Manage and triage tickets reported by internal business customers; translate non-technical user feedback into actionable technical symptoms, assess operational business impact, and provide clear, empathetic updates. • Technical Team Intake: Oversee and process highly technical incidents, bugs, and deployment dependencies raised internally by the Custom Software Solutions group, ensuring swift routing to the appropriate development tracks. • Monitor and refine daily queues to ensure all incoming tickets - regardless of source - are quickly categorized, prioritized, and processed in strict accordance with our service management and change management processes. 3. Manual Testing, BSA Collaboration & App Understanding • Partner systematically with Business Systems Analysts (BSAs) to transform complex functional requirements and user stories into comprehensive manual test plans, matrices, and regression suites. • On our older suite of applications, lead the execution of the manual testing lifecycle, performing functional, exploratory, and end-to-end integration testing to build a thorough technical and business-logic understanding of the application. • On our newer automated test platforms, review and help define the outputs of automated tests to verify testing was accurate. • Participate actively in functional grooming and sprint planning sessions to proactively identify potential operational support risks and refine estimation accuracy before code is deployed. 4. Defect Management & DevOps Integration (GitHub & GitLab) • Enforce strict quality standards for bug reporting across the team, ensuring every log includes unambiguous steps to reproduce, actual vs. expected results, and environment contexts. • Utilize GitHub and GitLab to track developer issues, monitor pull requests/merge requests associated with hotfixes, and map code changes back to original ServiceNow incidents. • Conduct routine defect triage meetings with product owners, BSAs, and lead developers to evaluate, prioritize, and assign ownership of the bug backlog. • Assess release readiness, validate bug fixes in non-production environments, and present formal QA sign-offs to leadership. 5. Team Leadership & Development • Provide direct leadership, coaching, and strategic direction to a team of software testers and support analysts. • Establish and track clear operational performance metrics (KPIs) regarding application performance, test execution velocity, and ticket turnaround time. • Drive out the delivery of documented standard operating procedures. • Cultivate a continuous learning culture, ensuring team standard operating procedures (SOPs) and technical knowledge bases are persistently updated. Qualifications • Experience: 5+ years of combined experience in Software Quality Assurance (QA) and Application Support environments, with at least 2+ years in a Team Lead or Managerial capacity. • Estimation & Capacity Planning: Proven experience generating Level of Effort (LOE) and operational maintenance estimates for complex IT portfolios or Software Portfolio Managers (SPM). • ITSM Tooling: Advanced, hands-on expertise with ServiceNow managing incident workflows, SLAs, and complex multi-channel intake queues is a benefit. • Stakeholder Communication: Proven ability to communicate effectively across both technical lines (with the Custom Software Solutions group and dev teams) and non-technical lines (with internal business customers and portfolio leadership). • Version Control & CI/CD Ecosystems: Proven proficiency navigating GitHub and GitLab to track issues, view commits, and collaborating with developers within a modern Git-based workflow. • SDLC Frameworks: Thorough understanding of Agile Scrum and Kanban lifecycles, with the ability to integrate QA processes smoothly into continuous delivery pipelines. • Technical Acuity: Ability to interpret application log files, interrogate databases using basic SQL, and test APIs to facilitate comprehensive root-cause analysis during triage.