Software Manager, Quality Engineering (SDET & Automation)

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Your Role:

We are seeking a highly experienced hands-on Software Manager of Quality Engineering who will lead the Quality function for an Exposure Management product with a strong focus on an automation-first strategy, observability-driven quality insights, and data-backed decision making. You will step in to directly manage a dedicated team of 6 to 8 engineers, optimizing their workflow and taking ownership of team management. This is a hybrid role

Your Opportunity:

• Manage, mentor, and grow a tight-knit US-based team of 6 to 8 QA engineers and SDETs.
• Conduct regular one-on-ones and build a culture of engineering excellence.
• Hybrid office role: 3 days per week for Maryland residents, 1 to 2 days per week for DC/Northern Virginia residents.
• Operate in a 50% to 60% hands-on capacity.
• You will be deeply involved in designing, enhancing, and implementing the automation framework, as well as picking up targeted SDET tasks.
• Define and execute the long-term Quality Engineering vision, aligned with product and engineering goals.
• Own the automation roadmap across UI, API, performance, integration, and end-to-end testing, ensuring automation is embedded into CI/CD workflows.
• Implement and enhance observability practices using logs, metrics, traces, and synthetic monitoring.
• Partner with DevOps/SRE to improve error budgets and early incident detection.
• Build a monthly Quality Insights report for leadership.
• Define, track, and present data-driven quality metrics such as automation coverage, escaped defect rate, release reliability score, and performance baselines.

What You'll Need:

• 7–10+ years of experience in Quality Engineering, including 2–5 years directly leading teams.
• You must have a strong background working in product-based software companies.
• Experience managing smaller teams of 6 to 8 engineers.
• Candidates whose recent experience is primarily managing massive teams of 20 or more engineers will not be a fit, as maintaining hands-on capability is required.
• Deep expertise in test automation frameworks and cloud-based SaaS delivery.
• Experience with Playwright preferred, Selenium, or Python, we value your core knowledge of automation architecture in large environments over specific syntax.
• Strong understanding of observability tools (Datadog, Grafana) and hands-on experience with performance testing tools (JMeter, K6, etc.).
• Strong command over quality metrics, reporting, excellent communication, and stakeholder management skills.