Head of Quality Engineering

Responsibilities

• Own Sift's overall quality strategy and serve as the accountable owner for release quality sign-off across all customer-facing products.
• Build and lead the QA function, scaling to roughly 30 people. The majority will be outsourced testers managed through external vendors; internal headcount will start at zero and may grow to a small core of up to ten over time.
• Select, onboard, and manage external QA vendor teams (for example, Keywords-style partners), holding them to clear quality bars, throughput expectations, and SLAs.
• Establish formal test planning for every major feature and release, including regression suites, and enforce a QA pass on all user-facing products.
• Organize testing into embedded squad testing and dedicated release testing, with test leads coordinating coverage across squads and releases.
• Stand up structured customer bug intake, triage, and prioritization so that issues are caught, ranked, and resolved through a defined workflow rather than ad hoc.
• Apply AI to accelerate the function: drafting test plans, test cases, and documentation, and building internal tooling such as admin utilities to create test accounts and set up test conditions.
• Partner with engineering to expand automated testing over time, while continuing to invest in manual testing where human judgment matters most, especially for UX.
• Define and track quality metrics and service-level objectives, and report on them to engineering leadership and, when needed, directly to customers.
• Coach engineers on self-testing and help embed quality ownership across the product development lifecycle.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience in QA, with a track record of senior quality leadership and the scope and judgment expected of a principal-level or director-level owner.
• At least 3 years of experience managing people, including building and managing teams and developing test leads.
• Direct experience managing external or outsourced QA vendor teams and getting strong outcomes from them.
• Strong QA fundamentals: test planning, test case design, regression strategy, triage, and release management.
• Hands-on quality experience across frontend, with depth in web and ideally desktop, as well as backend systems.
• An AI-forward approach to QA, using modern tooling to accelerate test definition, documentation, and internal tool building, while knowing when manual testing is the right call.
• Highly organized, autonomous, and comfortable building structure in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to work with internal stakeholders and speak credibly with external customers.
• Experience in B2B. Extensive B2C experience will also be considered.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in aerospace, defense, robotics, autonomous systems, or another mission-critical or safety-relevant domain.
• Experience standing up a QA discipline from scratch at a growth-stage company.
• Familiarity with observability, telemetry, or large-scale data platforms.