QA - Associate Director

About Anchanto

Anchanto is a global enterprise SaaS company whose Cloud and AI platforms power millions of e-commerce and logistics transactions each month across 70+ countries. We combine deep industry expertise with cutting-edge technology to help the world’s largest brands, 3PLs, and marketplaces operate and scale seamlessly.

Role Overview

As QA Associate Director, you will be the strategic owner of Anchanto’s quality engineering vision. You’ll reshape the department’s culture, processes, and tooling, instilling an automation-first, engineering-excellence mindset throughout a rapidly expanding global organisation. You will lead 3–5 QA Managers (collectively 30-40 QA engineers) and partner closely with Product, Platform, and DevOps leaders to embed high-trust quality gates across our CI/CD pipelines. This is a rare opportunity to build (or rebuild) a modern, data-driven QA function from the ground up and ensure every release delights our customers at scale.

Key Responsibilities

1. Quality Strategy & Leadership

• Define one year quality engineering roadmap aligned to product, platform and process restructure.
• Establish best-in-class QA frameworks, metrics, and governance (defect leakage ≤ 0.2 %, 95 % critical-path automationExperience introducing AI/ML-driven quality tooling).
• Champion shift-left and continuous testing principles, integrating quality early in design and architecture reviews.

1. Organisational Design & Talent Growth

• Evaluate current team structure; re-organise or rebuild as required to optimise for scalability, autonomy, and product alignment.
• Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier QA Managers and Principal SDETs; create clear career ladders, succession plans, and up-skilling programs (code quality, systems thinking, cloud-native testing).

1. Engineering Excellence & Automation

• Standardise toolchains (e.g., Selenium / Testim / Cypress for UI, Rest Assured / Postman for API, JMeter / k6 for performance, chaos frameworks for resilience).
• Introduce code-review-like practices for test automation, enforcing SOLID principles, DRY test utilities, and version-controlled test assets.
• Drive in-sprint automation (definition-of-done includes automated tests and service-level objectives).

1. Process & Governance

• Implement Agile@Scale / SAFe quality checkpoints, ensuring every scrum team owns unit, integration, and contract testing.
• Deploy quality dashboards in Jira/Confluence and Grafana to visualise real-time risk and readiness; use data to drive continuous improvement.
• Own production defect triage and post-mortems, ensuring systemic fixes and test-suite updates within SLA.

1. Cross-Functional & Stakeholder Management

• Serve as single voice of quality in release go/no-go forums, architecture boards, and customer escalations.
• Collaborate with DevOps to maintain quality gates in CI/CD, including static analysis, security scans, and performance baselines.
• Manage QA vendor/partner relationships and budgets where outsourced capacity is required.

Required Experience & Skills

• 15+ years in software quality / engineering, with 7+ years in senior people leadership (managing managers).
• Proven track record building or transforming QA organisations ≥ 40 engineers for high-transaction-volume SaaS products.
• Deep hands-on understanding of test automation architecture, microservices QA, API & contract testing, performance, security, and reliability engineering.
• Mastery of Agile/Scrum or SAFe, CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar), cloud-native stacks (AWS/GCP/Azure), and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Strong command of quality metrics & analytics; ability to define, instrument, and communicate KPIs that influence engineering behaviour.
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and change-management skills; experience working with distributed teams across multiple time zones.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent industry experience).
• Experience introducing AI/ML-driven quality tooling (self-healing tests, test-impact analysis, defect prediction).

Nice-to-Have

• Certifications: ISTQB Advanced TM, SAFe SPC/POPM, CSM, or DevOps Institute.
• Background in e-commerce, logistics, WMS/TMS, or high-volume transactional platforms.
• Budget ownership and vendor-selection experience for automation tools and managed testing services.