Head of Software Quality & Support

Key Responsibilities

• Software Quality Assurance
• Define and drive the company-wide QA strategy, including both manual and automated testing.
• Ensure rigorous testing standards are applied consistently throughout development sprints.
• Lead the adoption of test automation tools and frameworks to increase release confidence.
• Oversee the design of test plans, test cases, and execution cycles aligned with feature roadmaps.
• Ensure quality gates are in place for deployments, using metrics like code coverage, regression rate, and release defect rate.
• Collaborate with developers to foster a shift-left testing mindset across engineering squads.
• Software Support & Troubleshooting
• Manage and continuously improve the Level 2 Software Support team responsible for investigating and resolving production incidents and escalated issues.
• Lead structured root cause analysis (RCA) for critical incidents, ensuring learnings are captured and translated into preventive measures.
• Ensure accurate categorization, documentation, and timely resolution of support tickets, bugs, and system anomalies.
• Use observability and tracing tools (e.g., Datadog, Kibana, Sentry) to diagnose issues within distributed systems.
• Collaborate closely with development teams to reduce recurring support issues and address technical debt.
• Define and monitor support metrics like incident MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution), ticket backlog, and recurrence rate.
• Technical Leadership
• Provide hands-on technical guidance to the team in debugging and tracing complex issues.
• Encourage knowledge sharing and build a repository of known issues, fixes, and support playbooks.
• Act as an internal escalation point for high-severity issues that require in-depth system-level investigation.
• Work closely with DevOps and SREs to analyze logs, metrics, and infrastructure configurations to resolve edge-case incidents.
• Team Leadership & Strategy
• Lead and grow a blended team of QA engineers and software support specialists.
• Build a culture of technical ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Create career development plans, conduct regular feedback cycles, and foster cross-training between QA and support disciplines.
• Participate in engineering leadership forums to represent operational quality and production readiness.
• Align priorities with product, customer success, and engineering to maintain quality across releases and reduce user-impacting issues.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in software QA, development, or support roles within fast-paced tech environments.
• 5+ years of experience leading QA and/or software support teams.
• Strong software troubleshooting skills, with an ability to read logs, inspect APIs, analyze stack traces, and track down root causes.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language (e.g., Python, JavaScript, Java).
• Familiarity with modern SDLC processes, microservices architectures, REST APIs, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with testing frameworks (e.g., Selenium, Cypress, Postman), observability tools (e.g., Elastic, Grafana), and ticketing systems (e.g., Jira, FreshDesk).

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong understanding of software architecture and the ability to navigate and debug complex distributed systems (e.g., microservices, event-driven architectures).
• Prior experience in leading both QA and support functions, especially in fast-scaling startups or high-growth tech companies.
• Familiarity with performance testing, load testing, and chaos engineering principles.
• Solid experience implementing or auditing QA process standards such as ISTQB, ISO, or Agile Test Maturity Models.
• Proven success in building or improving automated test suites, especially for web and mobile apps.
• Experience designing or integrating with support triage frameworks, such as ticket prioritization logic, automated escalations, or internal knowledge base systems.
• Ability to mentor team members in technical debugging, support traceability, and write RCA documents that feed into long-term product stability.
• Familiarity with customer impact analysis, including quantifying how bugs and outages affect business metrics like churn, conversion, or NPS.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to translate technical issues to non-technical stakeholders and drive collaborative decision-making.
• Experience working with error tracking, log management, and monitoring tools, such as Sentry, Datadog, New Relic, Kibana, Grafana, and Prometheus
• Bonus: Experience in logistics, e-commerce, or delivery-tech platforms, where operational accuracy and uptime are critical.