Engineering Manager, QA

Overview

Lead Emergent's Quality Assurance function, strengthen testing practices, and ensure consistent product quality across teams, while building and managing a high-performing QA team.

What you'll do

• Own the QA strategy and testing approach across product features and releases.
• Define test plans, test scenarios, coverage expectations, and release-readiness criteria based on product risks.
• Ensure functional, regression, integration, exploratory, and end-to-end testing are performed effectively.
• Identify quality risks early during requirement discussions and ensure appropriate test coverage before development is completed.
• Establish consistent QA processes and standards across product teams.
• Ensure testing focuses on customer experience, business-critical workflows, and potential production risks.
• Own QA sign-off and communicate release risks clearly to stakeholders.
• Drive defect triage, prioritisation, root cause discussions, and follow-up on critical issues.
• Ensure production defects are analysed and preventive actions are implemented.
• Monitor defect leakage, regression failures, escaped bugs, and recurring quality issues.
• Partner with Engineering and Product leaders to make informed release decisions.
• Balance release timelines with product quality and customer impact.
• Lead, mentor, and develop QA engineers, helping them improve testing skills, product understanding, and ownership.
• Set clear expectations, goals, and performance standards for the team.
• Conduct regular feedback and career development discussions.
• Hire and onboard QA talent as the organisation grows.
• Allocate team resources based on product priorities and release commitments.
• Build a culture of accountability, collaboration, proactive communication, and continuous improvement.
• Encourage team members to take ownership of quality rather than limiting their responsibilities to executing test cases.
• Work closely with Engineering, Product, and Design teams to ensure requirements are testable and quality risks are identified early.
• Participate in feature planning, requirement reviews, and release discussions.
• Ensure QA is involved throughout the development lifecycle rather than only during final validation.
• Communicate testing progress, blockers, release risks, and quality status to stakeholders.
• Drive alignment across teams on defect severity, release readiness, and quality expectations.
• Improve team execution by identifying process bottlenecks and removing unnecessary testing delays.
• Improve test planning, test case quality, regression coverage, and testing efficiency.
• Identify opportunities to reduce repetitive manual effort and improve QA productivity.
• Encourage the team to use AI tools where appropriate to support test scenario creation, test documentation, and test analysis.
• Maintain a basic understanding of automation capabilities and collaborate with SDETs when automation can improve coverage or efficiency.
• Use quality metrics and production feedback to identify improvement areas and track progress.

What you'll need

• 8–12 years of experience in software QA and testing, with meaningful experience leading or managing QA teams.
• Strong understanding of software testing methodologies, functional testing, regression testing, exploratory testing, and defect management.
• Experience managing release quality and making risk-based testing and release-readiness decisions.
• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and develop QA engineers.
• Experience working closely with Engineering and Product teams in a fast-paced product environment.
• Strong understanding of the software development lifecycle, agile delivery, and release processes.
• Ability to analyse requirements, identify edge cases, and ensure adequate test coverage.
• Experience tracking quality metrics, analysing defect trends, and driving process improvements.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, prioritisation, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong ownership and the ability to manage multiple priorities without compromising critical quality standards.

Nice to have

• Basic understanding of test automation concepts and their role in improving testing efficiency.
• Experience collaborating with SDETs or automation engineers.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted testing and AI productivity tools.
• Experience testing SaaS products, AI-powered applications, or complex user workflows.
• Experience establishing QA processes in a rapidly growing organisation.

Details

• Location: Bangalore.