QA Team Lead, AVP

Summary:

Charles River Development empowers investment firms worldwide with a cloud-based platform that streamlines and automates the investment process across asset classes. As part of State Street Alpha®, we bring together data, technology, and services to help clients make confident decisions and scale with agility. Our open ecosystem and global support model enable investment professionals—from portfolio managers to private markets specialists—to navigate complexity and drive innovation. At Charles River, we thrive on collaboration, continuous improvement, and a shared commitment to shaping the future of financial technology.

This is a product leadership role with responsibility for creating and driving quality initiatives through the SDLC. This leader will work as a member of the central QA team to implement industry best practices and innovative test strategies to ensure CRD delivers exceptional quality products that delight our clients. The role requires a passion for quality as well as extensive current experience in implementing and modifying large scale, cross-functional test frameworks with well-balanced coverage across UI, back-end integration and database levels.  The individual must have proven success in improving process and quality via test and process automation, defining the right strategy and technology based on process and architecture assessment by engaging various roles and stakeholders. This individual will provide subject matter expertise and direction to internal stakeholders to ensure best practices and enterprise standards are utilized and implemented throughout the test effort.

This leader will drive the overall quality strategy in planning and execution in a department while ensuring the product specialist’s work is impactful on the product and positively impacts the team. As department-level quality advocate, this position requires working with: development team leads to evaluate unit test quality and coverage, product owners on acceptance criteria as well as refining client requirements for testing and product specialists to provide meaningful evaluations of product quality with respect to test coverage of functionality, client workflows and data.

The ideal candidate is an experienced software QA leader with proven ability to grasp tough issues, problem solve quickly and deliver creative, well-engineered, high quality solutions. The role requires a demonstrated ability to develop and communicate meaningful, clear metrics that drive the teams to continuous improvement. 

The candidate will have deep hands-on experience with testing methodologies, automation techniques, tooling for functional, non-functional test automation, latest industry trends, best practices and integration with DevOps.

Experience in identifying test data management needs and creating a strategy is a must.

Financial services industry experience is preferred.

Responsibilities:

• Work with the Director of QA Programs in the evolution of the CRD test process so that it becomes the industry standard for financial application testing.
• Define and drive the overall quality strategy in planning and execution in a department
• Expand coverage with manual and automated functional, integration, regression, and performance tests.
• Ensure efficient and effective product testing by evaluating and expanding department metrics ; identify risks to project schedule and product quality , proposes methods to mitigate risks
• Plan and participate in group testing activities to increase the value of integration testing.
• Training new product specialists and mentor junior staff in proper creation and planning of test processes
• Spearhead the effort in the department to align tools, processes and training to support the quality organization in expanding test coverage and automation and seamlessly adopting new technologies that will drive product growth.

• Audit and define good tests emphasizing customer focus, repeatable, data driven.
• Evaluate client patch request and determine how to reduce and hold the line on the need for them.
• Audit the testing process for patches conducted by teams.
• Assess environments and data sets required for proper testing of changes and enhancements, verify they have been incorporated into the testing process.

• Perform White glove testing

• Raise quality concerns and propose a plan to address those concerns
• Serve as an expert resource for developers working on performance tests
• As adjunct member of each scrum team, participate in key team processes to offer guidance (demos, retros)
• Audit the quality process by reviewing quality KPI