Director of Software Development Testing

Director of Software Development Testing A prestigious company is looking for a Director of Software Development Testing. This role will architect and implement advanced automation solutions across applications, data and platforms, enable adoption of best practices, and establish the governance, metrics and tools. Base pay range $170,000.00/yr - $210,000.00/yr Hybrid, 3 days onsite, 2 days remote. We are unable to sponsor as this is a permanent full-time role. Location: Chicago, IL Responsibilities Drive adoption of automation in all phases of testing including automated regression and smoke tests to improve quality and accelerate testing. Implement automated quality gates, pre/post deployment checks and shift-left testing. Architect scalable, reusable automation frameworks covering UI, API, microservices, data pipelines, Kafka/event driven systems, batch jobs, reports and databases. Define standards for BDD, contract testing, CI/CD integration, synthetic data generation and environment-agnostic test automation. Establish tagging and traceability across automation framework, Jira, Confluence, Test management tools, CI/CD pipelines and Splunk. Introduce and scale synthetic test data management, environment/service virtualization for complex integration testing. Envision and implement AI/ML and Generative AI infused solutions for test case generation, test data generation, automation script generation and quality insights. Build quality engineering and automation center of excellence to drive training, reusable asset libraries and knowledge management artifacts. Partner with development, product, DevOps and Platform Engineering leaders to embed automation into all stages of SDLC. Define, monitor and report KPIs/OKRs for automation outcomes to executives and product owners. Drive compliance with industry standards, regulatory requirements, and audit readiness across automation and QE practices. Manage a team of people managers, individual contributors, and consultants/contractors. Qualifications BS degree in Computer Science or Information Systems Management or a similar technical field 10+ years of experience in Quality Assurance space, preferably on complex systems and large programs Minimum ten (15) years’ of IT experience with ten (10)+ years in test automation Proven track record of leading enterprise-scale automation initiatives in complex, distributed environments (microservices, cloud, batch applications, data, MQ, Kafka event driven systems) Hands-on experience with service virtualization, synthetic test data management Strong hands-on expertise in testing and test automation tools and frameworks including Jira, BDD, Selenium, Cucumber, REST-assured, JMeter, Playwright Strong programming experience in Java and Python Deep understanding of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Harness, GitHub), cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and containerized environments (Kubernetes, Docker) Experience with Kafka/event-driven testing, large data set validations Experience with Agile development processes for enterprise software solutions Proficiency with modern quality engineering tools including Jira, Jenkins, automation frameworks, test management tools Software QA methodologies (requirements analysis, test planning, functional testing, usability testing, performance testing, etc.) Familiarity with AI/ML/GenAI solutions in QE Past/Current experience of 3+ years working on a large-scale cloud native project; experience with AWS cloud services and migrations is a plus Seniority level Director Employment type Full-time Job function Information Technology #J-18808-Ljbffr