As Director of QA Engineering, you will play a key role within the Engineering organization as a thought leader, transformational leader, influencer, and champion of best practices in the quality automation area. You will be responsible for building, owning, driving, and influencing a quality practice and creating a company-wide QA COE (Center of Excellence).  In this role, you must be able to understand the business problems being solved and apply strong agile testing principles to the SDLC.  You will need to bring deep experience and a strong quality and automation mindset to shape the practice and mentor quality engineers embedded in agile development teams. As part of the program leadership team you will work with the business, product, and engineers to deliver high quality solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Provide hands-on leadership to a team of QA Engineers/SDETs and partner with/influence the leads of other disciplines to increase the QA impact across the 84.51 platform.
• Build the 84.51 QA COE in terms of tools, processes, best practices, and people. Research and recommend tools. Define QA strategy, establish processes, identify gaps, mentor QA SDETs.
• Partner with Kroger Technology Division to leverage their QA COE and align on tools and best practices while adapting to fit 84.51 Engineering org needs.
• Advocate for shift-left approach to testing, Continuous Testing mindset, and be the voice of quality.
• Own the writing and presenting of presentations around testing strategies and best practices to internal and external stakeholders.
• Define, direct, and review the development of new testing frameworks and applications and ensure the implementation of manual and automated test solutions.
• Partner closely with DevOps team in integrating QA automation into the CI/CD pipelines as we embrace event-driven, zero-touch pipelines and releasing to production multiple times per day.
• Partner closely with SRE/Product Support teams in integrating findings from incidents into future QA automation.
• Review test planning, test cases, and test case automation. Identify and report on metrics that provide insight on quality of the solutions.
• Provide and/or review time estimates, technical recommendations, and proposed test solutions based on technical and business requirements.
• Manage QA team through defined key objective indicators and specified goals that align to the company’s direction and objectives.
• Recruit, hire and manage great talent in quality engineering

Knowledge and skills:

• 10+ years in quality engineering or software engineering
• 5+ years in QA automation and leading team of SDETs
• 3+ years working with DevOps teams and integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Thorough knowledge of fundamental quality processes and best practices and experience executing the practices
• Experience with TDD and/or BDD, white box and black box testing.
• Experience testing end to end solutions within an Agile development environment heavily leveraging automation
• Experience testing complex systems producing highly reliable and robust solutions
• Experience with API testing to ensure functionality, reliability, performance, and security
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills including the writing and presenting of presentations around testing strategies and best practices.

Desired skills (optional):

• Experience in the retail space
• Experience testing big data analytic solutions
• Knowledgeable and experienced in the following tech areas/skills:
• Microservice architecture
• 12 factor applications
• A/B testing
• Data focused testing and validation
• Data Science concepts such as models, machine learning, training data etc

Education and work experience:

• BS. Computer Science or equivalent

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