QA & Release Engineering Manager

We are seeking a hands-on QA & Release Engineering Manager to raise the quality bar across our software delivery process and help build a disciplined, scalable QA function. This person will actively test software, lead QA practices and standards, expand test automation, and ensure releases are validated and deployed safely and predictably.

This is not a coordination-only management role. The ideal candidate is an experienced QA or quality engineer who can set expectations for the QA team while remaining technically hands-on with testing, automation, CI/CD, deployments, and release troubleshooting. The role combines QA leadership, quality engineering, release management, and practical DevOps responsibility.

Core Responsibilities
QA Leadership, Standards & Discipline
• Own and continuously improve the QA process across the product and engineering organization.
• Establish clear QA standards for test planning, execution, regression testing, defect reporting, evidence, retesting, and sign-off.
• Set a high and consistent quality bar for the QA team and coach team members on effective testing practices.
• Ensure QA work is systematic, reproducible, documented, and traceable rather than dependent on informal or ad-hoc testing.
• Define what must be validated for different types of changes and ensure appropriate test coverage before release.
• Review QA results and challenge incomplete testing, weak defect reproduction, or unsupported sign-off.
• Identify recurring gaps in QA execution and drive corrective process improvements.
• Help establish useful QA metrics such as escaped defects, regression failures, reopen rates, automation coverage, and recurring defect categories.
• Work constructively with Engineering and Product while maintaining independent authority to determine when quality requirements have not been met.

Hands-On Quality Assurance
• Personally perform functional, regression, integration, exploratory, and release testing as needed.
• Create and maintain test plans and test cases for new functionality, regressions, integrations, and critical workflows.
• Validate acceptance criteria and verify that completed engineering work behaves correctly across relevant environments and scenarios.
• Produce clear, actionable defect reports with reproducible steps, expected versus actual behavior, supporting evidence, and appropriate severity.
• Ensure defects are properly retested and regressions are covered before closure.
• Focus QA effort based on product risk, customer impact, change scope, and historical failure patterns.

QA Automation & Quality Engineering
• Own and expand meaningful automated regression coverage across the product.
• Determine which tests should be automated and which are better suited to manual or exploratory testing.
• Build, maintain, and troubleshoot automated UI, API, integration, and regression tests as appropriate.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and ensure they run at the correct stages of software delivery.
• Establish automated quality gates that prevent progression or release when required tests fail.
• Track flaky tests, automation failures, coverage gaps, and recurring regressions and drive them to resolution.
• Work with Engineering to ensure unit and engineering-level tests remain an engineering responsibility while QA provides broader product, integration, and regression assurance.
• Continuously reduce repetitive manual QA work where reliable automation provides better coverage and faster feedback.

Release Ownership & Deployment Control
• Own or directly support the end-to-end release process from QA readiness through production deployment and validation.
• Establish and enforce clear Definition of Release Ready and Definition of Release Complete standards.
• Confirm required code reviews, tests, scans, approvals, documentation, QA sign-off, deployment steps, and rollback preparation are complete before release.
• Plan, coordinate, execute, and validate production releases across relevant application components.
• Maintain release schedules, release manifests or records, release notes, deployment evidence, and rollback procedures.
• Identify release risks and dependencies early and escalate blockers before they affect delivery.
• Have the authority and judgment to stop or delay a release when required quality or readiness criteria have not been met.
• Ensure failed or partially completed releases have clear recovery and rollback procedures.
CI/CD, DevOps & Deployment Automation
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines supporting build, test, security validation, packaging, and deployment.
• Maintain and improve Bitbucket repositories, Git workflows, branching practices, pull-request workflows, and pipeline integrations as they relate to quality and releases.
• Automate deployments across development, QA/staging, and production environments.
• Reduce manual deployment steps and opportunities for human error while preserving appropriate controls.
• Ensure pipelines provide clear visibility into failures and prevent unsafe deployments.
• Support and troubleshoot Docker/containerized application environments and deployment workflows.
• Support and oversee deployments into AWS environments, including configuration, permissions, dependencies, logs, monitoring, and deployment health.
• Help maintain consistency across development, QA/staging, and production environments and troubleshoot environment-related failures with Engineering.

Security, Release Validation & Production Follow-Through
• Integrate and maintain automated security, dependency, vulnerability, and code-quality scanning within the delivery pipeline.
• Define how critical test, security, and code-quality findings affect release readiness.
• Define and execute post-deployment smoke tests and validation procedures.
• Verify that releases are functioning correctly before considering deployment complete.
• Monitor deployment health, errors, logs, and other production signals following releases.
• Coordinate rapid response, rollback, or remediation when a release introduces problems.
• Lead or participate in post-release reviews and ensure quality or release failures result in concrete corrective actions.
• Maintain a clear audit trail showing what was released, when, by whom, and with which validations.

Required Skills & Traits

Must Have
• Strong hands-on software QA experience in a production SaaS, web application, or similarly complex software environment.
• Experience leading QA practices, setting testing standards, or serving as a senior/lead QA engineer responsible for the quality bar of a team.
• Strong understanding of test strategy, functional testing, regression testing, exploratory testing, integration testing, defect management, and release validation.
• Hands-on experience building or maintaining automated software tests, ideally including API, integration, regression, and/or browser-based testing.
• Experience integrating automated tests and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience managing or directly supporting software releases and production deployments.
• Strong experience with Git workflows, branches, pull requests, and repository management; Bitbucket experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience building, maintaining, or troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments.
• Working knowledge of AWS and cloud deployment environments.
• Ability to troubleshoot failed builds, pipelines, automated tests, environment problems, and deployments.
• Understanding of rollback strategies, release risk management, and production i ---------- response.
• Ability to distinguish between QA responsibilities and engineering responsibilities and hold both functions to appropriate quality standards.
• Strong attention to detail, disciplined follow-through, and low tolerance for undocumented, unverified, or casually bypassed quality steps.
• Ability to coach others, enforce standards constructively, and communicate clearly when work is not ready to progress.
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.

Nice to Have
• Previous experience as a QA Lead, QA Manager, Senior QA Automation Engineer, Quality Engineer, SDET, Release Engineer, or similar hands-on quality role.
• Experience managing or mentoring a distributed QA team.
• Experience with Bitbucket Pipelines.
• Experience with Docker or containerized deployments.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and AWS deployment automation.
• Experience with automated security, vulnerability, dependency, or static-analysis scanning.
• Familiarity with PHP, JavaScript, SQL, APIs, and web application architectures.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and alerting tools.
• Experience improving an existing QA organization where processes, automation, or release discipline needed to mature.
• Experience supporting distributed engineering and QA teams.

Ideal Profile
The ideal candidate is a senior QA practitioner who wants ownership, not someone who views QA management as primarily assigning test work or tracking tickets. They are comfortable getting directly involved in difficult testing, reproducing defects, reviewing automation, troubleshooting pipelines, and validating releases.

They can walk into an existing QA process, identify where discipline or coverage is weak, establish practical standards, coach the team to meet them, and measure whether quality is actually improving. They know when a defect indicates an isolated issue and when it points to a broader gap in testing, engineering checks, or release controls.
They also understand the software delivery process beyond QA: why a build failed, why a test should block deployment, how environments differ, how a release should be packaged and validated, and where CI/CD or deployment automation can eliminate risk and manual work.

They are comfortable saying that a release is not ready when required standards have not been met, while working constructively with Engineering, Product, and QA to resolve the issue quickly.

Success in this role means the QA team becomes more disciplined and effective, automated coverage increases where it matters, fewer defects escape into production, and releases become more predictable, auditable, and automated over time.