Quality Automation Architect

Responsibilities:

We are establishing the role of Quality Automation Architect to lead the modernization of our software quality management practices, tooling, and mindset. As a payment processor and licensed money transmitter, PayNearMe operates in a regulated, high-stakes environment with a high bar for quality. We're investing heavily in agentic AI workflows that will substantially accelerate how quickly we produce code — and we need our ability to validate that code to scale at the same pace. Your primary objective will be to drive our transformation to a fully automated test suite and deployment pipeline while maintaining our current extremely high quality metrics.

Today, our approach to QA follows a traditional release-validation process, combining automated tests with manual scenarios and post-release smoke testing. As agentic AI accelerates our ability to deliver software, we need to transform the way we think about signals that give us confidence in production readiness. This role is about enabling teams to ship faster and with less friction, while honoring the trust placed in us by our clients and their customers by maintaining a high bar for correctness.

Success in this role requires both technical depth and an ability to work cross-functionally. You will need to both learn and teach, be an agent and driver of change, work within regulatory and compliance frameworks, and get buy-in for transformational initiatives across a diverse product development organization.

Software Quality Strategy

• Define and lead the technical approach for modernizing software quality across our engineering organization, evolving from QA-as-gatekeeper toward a shared ownership model
• Assess our current QA processes, test automation, manual testing practices, release validation, and tooling, then develop a practical roadmap for reaching successive levels of maturity
• Propose and implement tooling, workflows and practices for building quality into the agentic SDLC
• Establish a long-term vision for quality management that reduces handoffs and allows development pods to operate with autonomy
• Partner closely with proddev leadership, SGRC, QA, and performance testing teams to align quality management practices with business risk, regulatory needs, and delivery goals
• Define, track, and report the metrics that will shape decisions, such as coverage and defect escape rates

Test Architecture & Automation

• Define a modern test pyramid with clear definitions, ownership, and goals for unit, integration, contract, end-to-end, exploratory, and production validation layers, along with specialized considerations such as performance and security
• Improve the reliability, speed, maintainability, and signal quality of our automated test suites; guide appropriate use of existing tools while identifying opportunities to improve, replace, or supplement them
• Develop strategies for test data management (seed, synthetic, and production-like sets), environment reliability, contract testing, service virtualization, synthetic monitoring, and automated smoke testing
• Identify opportunities to leverage agentic AI in test generation & scenario discovery, and design workflows and skills for multi-agent analysis of generated code

Release Readiness

• Design quality gates that are risk-based, automated where possible, and integrated into CI/CD pipelines
• Improve sandbox and production smoke testing so that post-deploy validation becomes faster, more automated, and more reliable, supporting a fast-rollback strategy when needed
• Collaborate with teams to define what “ready to release” means for different types of changes, services, and risk profiles

Mentorship and Change Leadership

• Provide technical mentorship to QA engineers, software engineers, and engineering leads.
• Teach modern quality engineering practices through pairing, workshops, documentation, architecture reviews, and hands-on examples.
• Build buy-in and drive change across teams by showing practical improvements rather than imposing abstract process changes.
• Help cultivate a culture where quality is owned broadly by engineering, supported by QA expertise, and embedded throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Approach change with empathy, especially for team members whose current roles and responsibilities will evolve.

Success in This Role

• Fully automated quality regression and smoke tests that allow for high confidence releases
• North star: A green build is safe to deploy
• Clearer testing standards across application, service, API, and event-driven boundaries.
• Implement state of the art AI based toolchains to constantly improve confidence in releases, with fewer escaped defects

Qualifications

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in a software development organization, ideally with a significant emphasis on quality management. Our current stack includes Ruby and Go codebases, and direct experience with one of these (preferably both) is a significant benefit.
• Significant experience with agentic software development workflows, skill development, prompt engineering, and supporting tools
• Proficiency with Git and branch management workflows (trunk-based, git-flow, etc); hands-on experience with GitLab for CI/CD strongly preferred
• Excellent communication skills; ability to build consensus and influence across teams, considering multiple perspectives and developing solutions that balance them effectively
• Commitment to data-driven decision making — able to develop and test hypotheses effectively, continually adjusting strategy as a result of new information; defining, tracking, and reporting on clear KPIs/OKRs
• Experience leading transformational projects and managing change well, ideally in sensitive, high-complexity environments with significant compliance or regulatory obligations