About this position
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 <5%, suite runtime <15 min, escape rate <2%)
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
Location and commute
Chicago, IL .
Plan your route with Google Maps. Travel times and transportation options vary; confirm the work location with the employer before commuting.
How to apply
Review the vacancy and complete the application on the employer or recruitment partner’s website. Requisition ID: WJ-3210385725.