Role Overview
Valor PayTech is seeking an accomplished Director of QA to lead the organization’s quality strategy, testing governance, automation initiatives, and quality engineering practices across all products and platforms, including its FinTech and CRM platforms. This role will be responsible for establishing a culture of quality, driving continuous improvement, ensuring product reliability, and leading high-performing QA teams to deliver world-class software solutions.
What We’re Looking For
This is a hands-on leadership role. We are looking for a quality leader who is, above all:
- Self-Starter — operates with autonomy and a strong bias for action; sets the quality agenda in ambiguity and owns outcomes end-to-end without waiting to be told.
- Technically Hands-On — while not expected to operate at core-development depth, maintains real technical grounding — can dive into automation frameworks, test code, API and performance suites, and CI/CD pipelines, and make sound engineering trade-offs.
- Strategic — connects quality investment to business risk and outcomes, anticipates where coverage and reliability gaps will hurt most, and prioritizes accordingly.
- Great Administrator — runs the QA organization with operational rigor — capacity planning, release-readiness governance, defect triage cadence, environment and test-data management, and metrics-driven accountability.
Key Responsibilities
Quality Strategy Leadership
- Define and execute the organization’s quality assurance vision, strategy, and roadmap.
- Establish enterprise-wide QA standards, methodologies, processes, and governance frameworks.
- Drive quality engineering transformation initiatives, including automation, performance testing, and continuous testing practices.
- Develop and implement quality metrics, KPIs, and reporting mechanisms to measure product quality and team effectiveness.
Test Management Quality Engineering
- Oversee end-to-end testing activities across multiple products, applications, and platforms.
- Define and implement comprehensive test strategies covering functional, integration, regression, performance, security, and user acceptance testing.
- Ensure consistent test planning, execution, defect management, and release readiness assessments.
- Drive adoption of modern testing methodologies, tools, and automation frameworks.
- Establish risk-based testing approaches and quality gates throughout the software development lifecycle.
Automation Continuous Improvement
- Lead enterprise-wide test automation initiatives to improve efficiency, coverage, and release velocity.
- Establish automation standards, frameworks, and best practices across teams.
- Drive continuous improvement through root cause analysis, defect prevention, and process optimization.
- Collaborate with DevOps and Engineering teams to integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
- Evaluate emerging QA technologies and tools to enhance testing effectiveness.
QA Operations Administration
- Own resource allocation and capacity planning across QA teams against competing release and project demands.
- Operate release-readiness and quality-gate governance to ensure controlled, auditable releases.
- Establish defect triage cadence and prioritization, and drive accountability to closure.
- Manage test environments and test-data strategy to keep teams unblocked and coverage realistic.
- Instrument QA with metrics — track coverage, defect leakage, automation ROI, and cycle time — and report against them.
Quality Governance Compliance
- Ensure adherence to quality standards, security requirements, compliance obligations, and internal governance policies.
- Establish audit readiness and quality control processes across development and release cycles.
- Drive quality reviews, process assessments, and corrective action initiatives.
- Partner with stakeholders to identify risks and implement mitigation strategies.
Leadership Stakeholder Management
- Build, mentor, and lead high-performing QA and Quality Engineering teams.
- Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product Management, DevOps, and Business stakeholders to align quality objectives with organizational goals.
- Provide regular quality updates, metrics, and strategic recommendations to executive leadership.
Required Qualifications
- 15–18 years of experience in Quality Assurance, Software Testing, or Quality Engineering, depending on technical proficiency and other factors.
- Demonstrated self-starter — sets the quality agenda in ambiguity and drives outcomes end-to-end without close oversight.
- Technically hands-on — able to work directly in automation frameworks, test code, API/performance suites, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Proven experience leading large-scale QA organizations and enterprise testing programs.
- Strong expertise in test strategy, quality governance, test management, and software development lifecycles.
- Extensive experience with automation testing frameworks, performance testing, and continuous testing practices.
- Hands-on experience managing quality assurance across web, mobile, API, cloud, and enterprise applications.
- Strong understanding of Agile, Scrum, DevOps, CI/CD, and modern software delivery practices.
- Experience managing geographically distributed and cross-functional teams.
Preferred Technical Environment
Testing: Functional, Regression, Integration, UAT, Performance, Security Testing
Automation: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium, TestNG, JUnit
API Testing: Postman, Rest Assured, SoapUI
Performance Testing: JMeter, LoadRunner, Gatling
Defect Management: Jira, Azure DevOps, Bugzilla
Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
Methodologies: Agile, Scrum, DevOps, Continuous Testing, Quality Engineering
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Experience in payments processing, payment gateways, POS terminals, merchant services, transaction processing, or other highly regulated financial environments.
- Experience in SaaS, Enterprise Software, or other regulated, high-availability domains.
- Certification in Quality Assurance, Agile, Testing, or Project Management is desirable.
- Experience with cloud-based applications and modern quality engineering practices.
Key Competencies
- Quality Leadership and Governance
- Strategic Planning and Execution
- Test Automation and Continuous Improvement
- Operational Rigor and QA Administration
- Stakeholder Management and Communication
- Team Building and Mentorship
- Risk Assessment and Problem Solving
- Decision-Making and Change Management
