Job Summary

Sorenson is seeking a Senior Quality Assurance Lead to build a modern QA Center of Excellence for the AST organization. This role will use automation and AI to move quality from a manual validation function into an engineering-owned capability embedded throughout the software development lifecycle. The Senior Quality Assurance Lead will define QA standards, automation strategy, AI-assisted testing workflows, CI/CD quality gates, dashboards, and feedback systems that help teams detect risk earlier and reduce manual testing. This leader will partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Hand Talk leadership to improve release confidence, increase developer ownership of quality, and help the organization mature toward an operating model where quality is built into how teams design, develop, test, and operate software.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Define and lead the vision for a modern QA Center of Excellence that uses automation and AI to reduce reliance on manual validation and embed quality throughout the software development lifecycle.

• Establish quality standards, testing strategy, automation architecture, and release-readiness criteria across UI, API, integration, regression, exploratory, and non-functional testing.

• Build and evolve AI-assisted QA workflows, including test generation, requirements-to-test traceability, failure analysis, defect triage, risk-based regression selection, and automation maintenance.

• Partner with developers to shift testing left by improving acceptance criteria, testability, unit/integration coverage, PR-level validation, and developer-owned automation.

• Integrate automated tests and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines so teams receive fast, reliable feedback before merge, during nightly runs, and before release.

• Create quality dashboards and reporting systems that show product health, automation coverage, regression status, defect trends, flaky tests, release risk, and improvement opportunities.

• Design a nightly automated QA pipeline capable of running against product codebases, identifying failures, filing actionable bugs, and publishing quality status without manual pass/fail documentation.

• Lead the evaluation, selection, and responsible use of QA tools, AI-enabled testing platforms, automation frameworks, test data approaches, and reporting systems.

• Mentor QA team members and developers in automation-first, AI-enabled quality practices, building team capability rather than centralizing all testing work inside QA.

• Partner with Product, Engineering, DevOps, and leadership to prioritize quality investments, communicate release risk, and continuously improve the organization's quality engineering practices.

Supervisory Responsibility

This position may have direct supervisory responsibility for QA team members as the QA Center of Excellence is established. The role will also provide technical leadership, coaching, and standards-setting for QA team members, developers, and cross-functional partners adopting automation-first and AI-enabled quality practices.

Travel Requirements

Travel Requirements: Less than 25%

Education

Minimum 4 Year / Bachelors Degree Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field; or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Certification or continuing education

Software testing, test automation, quality engineering, AI-assisted testing, DevOps, cloud platforms, or Agile software delivery.

Experience

4 years Experience in software quality assurance, quality engineering, SDET, test automation, or software engineering roles, including hands-on experience designing, building, or maintaining automated test frameworks

2 years Technical leadership experience defining QA strategy, improving automation practices, mentoring QA engineers or developers, integrating quality gates into CI/CD pipelines, or leading quality engineering transformation initiatives.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Strong hands-on experience with modern test automation for UI, API, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing using tools such as Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Postman, PyTest, or similar frameworks.

• Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub Actions, GitLab, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or similar platforms.

• Ability to define an automation-first quality strategy that reduces manual validation and increases developer ownership of testing.

• Practical understanding of AI-assisted quality engineering, including AI-supported test generation, failure analysis, defect triage, requirements-to-test traceability, risk-based regression selection, and automation maintenance.

• Strong programming or scripting ability in languages such as TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, or similar languages used for test automation and tooling.

• Experience designing quality dashboards, release-readiness metrics, defect trend reporting, automation coverage reporting, and other feedback systems that make product health visible.
• Ability to partner effectively with Product, Engineering, DevOps, QA, and leadership to clarify requirements, identify risk early, and embed quality practices throughout the software development lifecycle.

• Strong understanding of shift-left testing, testability, acceptance criteria, exploratory testing, nonfunctional testing, and release risk assessment.
• Ability to mentor QA team members and developers in automation-first, AI-enabled quality practices without centralizing all testing responsibility inside QA.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain quality risk, tradeoffs, and improvement opportunities to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.