Testing COE Leader / Test Center of Excellence Head
Role Overview
We are looking for an experienced Testing COE Leader to establish, lead, and continuously enhance the organization’s Testing Center of Excellence (COE). The role will be responsible for defining enterprise-wide testing strategy, governance, standards, methodologies, tools, automation, and quality practices across multiple technology programs.
The ideal candidate will have strong experience in QA leadership, test strategy, automation, DevOps, quality engineering, and large-scale transformation programs, with the ability to work closely with CIO/CTO organizations, business stakeholders, technology teams, and delivery partners.
Key Responsibilities
Testing Strategy & COE Leadership
- Define and implement the enterprise-wide Testing and Quality Engineering strategy.
- Establish and manage the Testing COE, including processes, standards, governance, and best practices.
- Develop testing frameworks, methodologies, templates, metrics, and quality standards.
- Drive standardization of testing practices across applications, projects, and technology teams.
- Establish a continuous improvement roadmap for testing capabilities.
Test Management & Governance
- Provide governance and oversight across functional, integration, system, regression, performance, security, and user acceptance testing.
- Define quality gates, entry/exit criteria, defect management processes, and release quality standards.
- Establish testing KPIs, dashboards, SLAs, and quality metrics for senior management.
- Conduct regular quality reviews and identify risks, gaps, and improvement opportunities.
Automation & Quality Engineering
- Drive enterprise-wide test automation strategy and adoption.
- Evaluate and standardize automation frameworks and tools.
- Promote shift-left testing, continuous testing, CI/CD integration, and DevOps practices.
- Drive adoption of modern Quality Engineering practices, including API testing, performance testing, service virtualization, and automated regression testing.
- Identify opportunities to leverage AI/GenAI for test generation, defect analysis, test optimization, and quality assurance.
People & Capability Development
- Build, mentor, and manage testing and quality engineering teams.
- Define competency frameworks, career paths, and training programs for QA professionals.
- Develop internal testing capabilities and communities of practice.
- Manage testing vendors, partners, and external service providers where required.
Stakeholder & Program Management
- Work closely with CIO, CTO, Product, Engineering, Architecture, Business, and Program Management teams.
- Provide testing leadership and quality assurance for strategic transformation initiatives.
- Communicate testing status, risks, dependencies, and quality metrics to senior leadership.
- Partner with delivery teams to ensure quality is embedded throughout the software development lifecycle.
Required Skills & Experience
- 12+ years of experience in software testing, QA, Quality Engineering, or technology delivery.
- 5+ years in senior QA/Test leadership or Testing COE leadership roles.
- Proven experience establishing or managing an enterprise Testing COE.
- Strong knowledge of SDLC, STLC, Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD methodologies.
- Strong experience in test automation strategy and implementation.
- Experience with testing tools and frameworks such as Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, JMeter, Postman, or equivalent.
- Experience integrating testing into CI/CD pipelines.
- Strong understanding of functional, integration, regression, API, performance, and end-to-end testing.
- Experience managing large, distributed testing teams and multiple concurrent programs.
- Strong vendor and stakeholder management skills.
- Excellent communication, leadership, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Certifications such as ISTQB, PMP, SAFe, Agile, or equivalent are desirable.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Experience with AI/GenAI-enabled testing and Quality Engineering.
- Experience in large enterprise or multinational environments.
- Experience managing offshore/onshore testing delivery models.
Key Performance Indicators
- Testing automation adoption and coverage
- Defect leakage and production defect rates
- Test cycle time and release efficiency
- Quality gate compliance
- Automation ROI
- Test execution productivity
- Reduction in regression testing effort
- Stakeholder satisfaction
- Overall application/release quality