QA Practice Lead (Senior Manager) -Bangalore

Job Description — QA Practice Lead (Senior Manager)

Role Overview

QA Practice Lead (Senior Manager) owns the strategic mandate of driving testing excellence across delivery programs, building scalable QA capabilities, governing quality outcomes, enhancing automation reliability, and positioning QA as a release-assurance led Center of Excellence. The role influences cross-functional engineering stakeholders, mentors QA leaders, governs practice-level metrics, and ensures predictable and production-safe releases across programs.

Key Responsibilities

1. Practice & CoE Leadership
   

● Define and govern enterprise QA standards, test frameworks, tooling strategy, automation blueprints, and quality gates.

● Build reusable assets, reliability layers, test accelerators and maturity roadmap for the QA Center of Excellence.

● Drive org-wide adoption of Shift-Left QA, Continuous Testing, CI/CD test stability, and DevOps quality governance.

1. Delivery Assurance (Multi-Program)
   

● Govern all QA streams: Functional, Regression, Integration, API, Mobile, Performance, Security, Accessibility and Cloud-native testing across delivery.

● Lead release-quality governance, test traceability, quality risk identification, mitigation, and production leakage prevention.

● Ensure test environments, test data, automation stability, and execution SLAs remain healthy across programs.

1. QA Talent Strategy & Leadership
   

● Own QA hiring blueprint, competency frameworks, talent pipeline, upskilling, utilization and career growth charter.

● Mentor and develop QA Tech Leads, Seniors, Automation Leads, and QA Owners across delivery units.

● Drive capacity forecasting, resource allocation, utilization balancing and skill scalability across engagements.

1. Stakeholder & Client Influence
   

● Act as senior quality advisor to Delivery, Engineering, Product and Client stakeholders for effort sizing, quality risk profiling, estimation governance and automation ROI.

● Ensure QA considerations are embedded into scope, sizing, architecture, proposals, and delivery commitments.

● Publish quality insights via dashboards and stakeholder-facing reports with clarity and confidence.

1. Metrics Transparency & Governance
   

● Define and govern org-level QA KPIs (Defects → Coverage → Automation → Velocity → Quality leakage).

● Drive continuous process improvements through data-led governance, tool optimization, and QA reliability engineering initiatives.

What This Role Will NOT Do

● Will not own single-project QA execution accountability.

● Will not write or micromanage project-level test cases or daily test execution.

● Will not replace engineering owners in defect accountability.

● Will not operate only in downstream/manual-only QA cycles.

Required Qualifications

● Bachelor’s Degree in CS/IT/Engineering or related field

● 8+ years QA experience including 3+ years in QA leadership or practice ownership roles

● Hands-on exposure to automation, CI/CD, API, performance and security testing tools

● Strong stakeholder influence, communication, governance-first QA mindset, and talent leadership

● Demonstrated ability to scale QA teams and govern release-safe quality outcomes

Preferred Qualifications

● Cloud-native QA experience (AWS, Azure, GCP testing)

● Scripting proficiency (Python/Java/JavaScript/TypeScript)

● ISTQB Advanced/Expert, Agile Testing, Scrum Master, Security/Performance specialisation