Head of Quality Assurance

Job title : Head of Quality Assurance

Key Roles and Responsibilities:

Quality Strategy and Governance

• Develop and execute the organization's Quality Assurance strategy, roadmap, and operational plans.
• Establish quality standards, testing methodologies, frameworks, and best practices across all products and projects.
• Define and monitor quality metrics, KPIs, and reporting mechanisms.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance product quality and team efficiency.
• Ensure adherence to organizational quality policies, standards, and procedures.

Test Planning and Execution

• Oversee the planning, design, execution, and reporting of software testing activities.
• Develop comprehensive test strategies, test plans, and test cases for all products and releases.
• Ensure functional, integration, regression, performance, usability,accessibility, and security testing are effectively conducted.
• Review and approve test results and release readiness reports.
• Ensure timely defect identification, tracking, prioritization, and resolution.

Test Automation and Quality Engineering

• Lead the implementation and expansion of automated testing frameworks and tools.
• Establish automation standards to improve testing efficiency and coverage.
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Drive adoption of modern Quality Engineering practices and shift-left testing approaches.
• Continuously improve test automation coverage and effectiveness.

Product Quality and Release Management

• Collaborate with Product Managers, Engineering Teams, Project
• Managers, and DevOps teams to ensure quality throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Participate in sprint planning, backlog grooming, product reviews, and release planning activities.
• Ensure software releases meet quality, security, and performance requirements before deployment.
• Monitor production environments and conduct root cause analysis for quality-related incidents.

Compliance, Security and Risk Management

• Ensure products comply with relevant government, industry, regulatory, and data protection requirements.
• Oversee quality controls for GovTech platforms handling sensitive citizen and government data.
• Collaborate with Information Security teams to perform security testing and vulnerability assessments.
• Support internal and external audits, compliance reviews, and certification initiatives.
• Identify and mitigate quality risks across projects and products.

Stakeholder Management

• Partner with business units, customers, government agencies, and project stakeholders to understand quality expectations.
• Provide regular quality performance reports and recommendations to executive leadership.
• Communicate quality risks, testing outcomes, and improvement opportunities effectively.
• Support customer escalations and critical issue resolution.

Leadership and Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and develop QA Engineers, Test Analysts, Automation
• Engineers, and Quality Leads.
• Set performance objectives and conduct regular performance reviews.
• Identify training and development needs within the QA team.
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.
• Build and maintain a high-performing quality assurance function.

Required Skills and Competencies

• Test Automation Frameworks.
• API Testing.
• Performance and Load Testing.
• Security Testing.
• CI/CD and DevOps Practices.
• Quality Management Systems.
• Defect Management and Root Cause Analysis.
• Agile and Scrum Methodologies.
• Test Management Tools (JIRA, Azure DevOps, TestRail, Zephyr, etc.).
• Automation Tools (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium, Postman, JMeter, etc.).

Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology,
• Software Engineering, Engineering, or a related field.
• A minimum of 7 years hands on experience in QA.
• Master's Degree is an added advantage.
• ISTQB Advanced Level Certification.
• Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA).
• Certified Agile Tester (CAT).
• Scrum Master or Agile-related certifications.
• ISO 9001 Lead Auditor certification (advantageous).