Principal Quality Engineering

Experience: 15+ years
Employment Type: Full-time
Location: India
Work Hours: Must be comfortable working with US/North American clients and overlapping with US business hours
About the Role
We are looking for an experienced Principal – Quality Engineering to lead quality engineering initiatives for large-scale enterprise applications and client engagements.
This is a senior, hands-on leadership role requiring a strong combination of quality strategy, test automation, manual testing, architecture, release governance, team leadership, and client management.
The ideal candidate has successfully built or transformed Quality Engineering functions, designed automation frameworks from the ground up, and worked directly with engineering leaders and enterprise clients to improve software quality and delivery processes.
This is not a purely managerial position. You should be comfortable reviewing architecture, testing complex workflows, designing automation frameworks, troubleshooting quality issues, and establishing engineering standards.
Key ResponsibilitiesQuality Strategy & Leadership
Assess existing QA/QE processes, tools, automation, architecture, and team capabilities.
Define the overall Quality Engineering strategy and roadmap.
Establish risk-based testing approaches across applications and services.
Define the appropriate mix of manual testing, automation, and AI-assisted testing.
Work directly with engineering leadership, product teams, architects, and client stakeholders.
Present quality findings, risks, recommendations, and progress to senior stakeholders.
Lead quality improvement or transformation programs from assessment through implementation.
Testing & Quality Processes
Establish quality processes across the complete software development lifecycle.
Integrate testing effectively into Agile and scaled Agile delivery environments.
Improve requirements and acceptance criteria by working closely with product and engineering teams.
Lead: Functional testing, Exploratory testing, End-to-end testing, Integration testing, API testing, Data validation, Regression testing, UAT support, Negative and boundary testing
Establish effective defect management, triage, root-cause analysis, and closure processes.
Define release-readiness criteria and quality gates.
Provide evidence-based recommendations on whether releases are ready for production.
Automation & Test Architecture
Design enterprise-level test automation architecture covering: Web/UI, APIs, Data, Integrations, Events and queues, Backend systems, End-to-end workflows
Design and build automation frameworks from the ground up.
Establish coding, framework, reporting, and automation standards.
Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines.
Define automated quality gates for production releases.
Evaluate testing tools and make build-vs-buy decisions.
Improve or replace unreliable automation frameworks and reduce flaky tests.
AI in Quality Engineering
Introduce AI-assisted workflows into software testing and quality engineering.
Use AI coding/testing tools to accelerate test design, automation, analysis, and maintenance.
Define standards and governance for AI-generated tests and code.
Review AI-generated automation to ensure correctness, maintainability, and engineering quality.
Experience with AI agents, MCP, or agent-based engineering workflows is highly desirable.
Team & Client Leadership
Lead Quality Engineering and automation teams of approximately 5–15 engineers.
Mentor QA engineers, SDETs, automation engineers, and QA leads.
Participate in interviewing and building engineering teams.
Work directly with North American clients and senior engineering stakeholders.
Facilitate technical discussions and quality workshops.
Establish processes and documentation that allow client teams to eventually operate independently.
Required Experience
15+ years of experience in Quality Assurance / Quality Engineering.
10+ years of hands-on test automation experience.
Experience leading at least one significant Quality Engineering transformation.
Experience establishing or significantly improving a QA/QE function.
Strong hands-on experience designing automation frameworks from scratch.
Experience leading QA/QE teams of 5–15+ engineers.
Strong understanding of enterprise system architecture and distributed applications.
Experience testing systems involving: Web applications, APIs, Databases, Microservices, Integrations, Middleware, Events and messaging systems
Strong understanding of CI/CD and automated quality gates.
Experience with Agile delivery and large multi-team programs.
Strong experience with defect management, release management, and production-readiness processes.
Excellent written and spoken English.
Strong communication skills for working directly with US/North American stakeholders.
Technical Skills
Strong hands-on experience with several of the following:
Playwright / Selenium / Cypress
TypeScript / JavaScript / Java / Python
Postman / REST API testing
Pact or contract testing
k6 / JMeter or similar performance testing tools
SQL and database validation
GitHub Actions / Jenkins / Azure DevOps
Jira
Xray / TestRail / Zephyr or similar test-management tools
AWS or other cloud platforms
BrowserStack or similar device/browser testing platforms
Experience using AI development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar tools is strongly preferred.
Preferred Experience
Experience working directly with US or North American clients.
Consulting or professional-services experience.
Experience working on large enterprise transformation programs.
Experience establishing a Quality Engineering Centre of Excellence (CoE).
Experience with enterprise platforms such as: Salesforce, MuleSoft, Workflow/BPM platforms
Experience with AWS-based systems and cloud-native architectures.
Experience with AI agents, MCP servers, or AI-assisted software engineering.
Valid US B1/B2 visa is an advantage.
What We Are Looking For
We are particularly interested in candidates who can demonstrate real examples of:
Building a Quality Engineering function from the ground up.
Transforming an underperforming QA organization.
Designing an automation framework that remained in production use.
Significantly reducing regression execution time.
Reducing flaky automated tests.
Implementing CI/CD quality gates.
Preventing defective releases through measurable quality processes.
Working directly with CTOs, VPs of Engineering, architects, and senior client stakeholders.
Candidates should be prepared to discuss specific projects, architecture decisions, measurable improvements, and their personal contribution during the interview process.

Work arrangement
No