Software Manager, Quality Engineering (SDET & Automation)

Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. without sponsorship. We are unable to provide sponsorship for work visas of any kind at the time of hire, or at any point during employment. This includes, but is not limited to: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, J-1, etc.

Your Role:

We are seeking a highly experienced hands-on Software Manager of Quality Engineering who will lead the Quality function for an Exposure Management product with a strong focus on an automation-first strategy, observability-driven quality insights, and data-backed decision making. You will step in to directly manage a dedicated team of 6 to 8 engineers, optimizing their workflow and taking ownership of team management. This is a hybrid role

Your Opportunity:

• Manage, mentor, and grow a tight-knit US-based team of 6 to 8 QA engineers and SDETs.
• Conduct regular one-on-ones and build a culture of engineering excellence.
• Hybrid office role: 3 days per week for Maryland residents, 1 to 2 days per week for DC/Northern Virginia residents.
• Operate in a 50% to 60% hands-on capacity.
• You will be deeply involved in designing, enhancing, and implementing the automation framework, as well as picking up targeted SDET tasks.
• Define and execute the long-term Quality Engineering vision, aligned with product and engineering goals.
• Own the automation roadmap across UI, API, performance, integration, and end-to-end testing, ensuring automation is embedded into CI/CD workflows.
• Implement and enhance observability practices using logs, metrics, traces, and synthetic monitoring.
• Partner with DevOps/SRE to improve error budgets and early incident detection.
• Build a monthly Quality Insights report for leadership.
• Define, track, and present data-driven quality metrics such as automation coverage, escaped defect rate, release reliability score, and performance baselines.

What You'll Need:

• 7–10+ years of experience in Quality Engineering, including 2–5 years directly leading teams.
• You must have a strong background working in product-based software companies.
• Experience managing smaller teams of 6 to 8 engineers.
• Candidates whose recent experience is primarily managing massive teams of 20 or more engineers will not be a fit, as maintaining hands-on capability is required.
• Deep expertise in test automation frameworks and cloud-based SaaS delivery.
• Experience with Playwright preferred, Selenium, or Python, we value your core knowledge of automation architecture in large environments over specific syntax.
• Strong understanding of observability tools (Datadog, Grafana) and hands-on experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, K6, etc.).
• Strong command over quality metrics, reporting, excellent communication, and stakeholder management skills.

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