Director, Software Engineering: DevOps

What You'll Do:

The Director of Application Release and Readiness Testing will provide strategic leadership for the organization's application deployment, validation, and production readiness programs. This role is responsible for establishing comprehensive frameworks to ensure applications meet quality standards before release, validating deployment readiness across environments, and implementing automated deployment practices that accelerate software delivery while maintaining stability.

Primary Duties and Responsibilities:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.

• Partners with development and testing teams to deliver software releases to test and production maintaining highest possible standards of stability.

• Oversees continuous improvement efforts by identifying and championing practical means of reducing time to market while maintaining high quality

• Must be a willing self-starter, independent, and comfortable with a fast paced, dynamic environment

• A team player who assists the team as required to achieve collective goals & delivery milestones including knowledge-share

• Drive automation of release validation processes to accelerate deployment cycles

• Implement release quality gates and evidence-based certification processes

• Collaborate with development, operations, and business stakeholders to define release acceptance criteria

• Establish metrics and KPIs to measure release quality, testing efficiency, and deployment readiness

• Lead post-release validation activities and coordinate resolution of release-related incidents

• Oversee the creation and maintenance of test environments that accurately mirror production

Testing and Validation Focus Areas

• End-to-end release pipeline validation

• Automated regression testing for release candidates

• Load and performance testing before deployment

• Integration and API compatibility verification

• Security and compliance validation

• Business process validation and user acceptance testing

• Data migration and transformation validation

• Configuration verification across environments

• Post-deployment smoke testing and validation

• Production readiness reviews and checklists

• Assists Production Support by prioritizing engineering workloads across the team

• Designs and oversees departmental and new employee training

Supervisory Responsibilities:

• Manage a team

Qualifications:

The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field

• 10+ years of experience in software testing, quality assurance, or release management

• 5+ years of leadership experience managing testing teams and processes

• Strong understanding of test automation frameworks and continuous testing approaches

• Experience implementing testing strategies for complex enterprise applications

• Knowledge of DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines

• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerized applications

• Strong understanding of performance testing methodologies and tools

• Experience with test management platforms and defect tracking systems

• Excellent analytical skills and attention to detail

• Outstanding communication and stakeholder management abilities

Success Criteria

• Establish standardized release readiness assessment frameworks

• Implement metrics-driven quality gates for all application releases

• Achieve 99% deployment success rate through improved pre-release validation

Technical Skills:

• [Required] Programming/scripting experience in languages like Java, Bash, Python or Go

• [Required] Knowledge of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tools (examples - GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, Docker, Compose, K8s)

• [Required] Java experience

• [Required] Experience with high speed distributed computing frameworks AWS EMR, Hadoop, HDFS, S3, MapReduce, Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Kafka Streams, Apache Flink etc.

• [Required] Experience with distributed message brokers Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Amazon Kinesis