Global Head of QA Engineering

Ink builds mission-critical aviation technology. This is not a traditional QA management role. Your mandate is to eliminate manual testing entirely and architect a fully AI-driven, automated quality engineering organisation. You will embed intelligent quality from code commit to production deployment, with zero human-gated regression cycles. You will own the quality bar across the entire engineering organisation and make quality a structural, measurable property of everything we ship. 

• Architect and lead the full transition from manual to AI-driven automated testing, targeting 100% automation coverage within 90 days, using platforms such as testRigor, Mabl, or Functionize.
• Build and own a fully automated CI/CD quality gate: every commit tested, every regression caught before staging — no human-gated test cycles. 
• Design end-to-end automated test coverage across products, and all platform services, including API, performance, load, and security testing scenarios. 
• Shift quality left, embed QA into sprint ceremonies, architecture reviews, and feature design so defects are prevented, not caught. 
• Define and own QA KPIs: defect escape rate, automation coverage %, mean time to detect, and release confidence score, reported at CTO, CPO, and client level. 
• Ensure automated validation of biometric processing flows and passenger intelligence pipelines against SLA-aligned SLOs, covering performance thresholds, not just functional correctness.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of QA engineers. Recruit for automation-first profiles; set the technical bar and provide career development support. 
• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Operations to integrate automated QA into agile workflows, sprint ceremonies, and release pipelines. 
• Act as the primary quality advocate across the organisation, influencing stakeholders at every level and driving a culture where quality is a competitive advantage, not a compliance gate.

• 10+ years in QA engineering; 3+ years leading QA teams in enterprise software environments
• Proven track record eliminating manual regression testing at scale and replacing it with AI-native automation in production 
• Experience with mission-critical software in regulated or high-uptime environments (aviation, fintech, healthcare, or similar) 
• Deep experience with CI/CD pipelines and TDD/BDD in agile development environments

Technical skills

• AI-native and no-code automation platforms: testRigor, Mabl, Functionize, or equivalent with self-healing test capabilities 
• Traditional automation stack: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, REST Assured; performance tools: k6, Gatling
• CI/CD integration: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes; experience implementing automated quality gates in release pipelines
• Defect and test management tools: Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent 
• Ability to define, track, and present quality metrics and KPIs at engineering and executive level

Leadership and Personal Attributes

• Builder mindset — you design systems, not processes; you automate before you document
• Data-driven — quality decisions backed by metrics and automation signals, not intuition or manual observation 
• Strong stakeholder communication — able to present quality strategy with conviction to executive and client audiences 
• Fluent in English and Spanish

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