Director of QualityDepartmentTechnology, Baxter Planning
Reports ToChief Technology Officer
TeamQA Manager, QA engineers, test automation engineers
Employment TypeFTE

About the Role

This role owns quality strategy across all Baxter Planning products and leads the modernization of the Quality organization. Baxter's development teams work with AI-assisted and agentic tooling, and the share of AI-generated code and tests keeps growing. Under these conditions manual review does not scale, and automation without a test strategy creates false confidence. The Director of Quality will move quality ownership earlier in the development lifecycle, reposition the QA team toward quality engineering, standards and platform work, upskill the team, and adopt or build AI-native quality tooling.

Key Responsibilities

- Own quality strategy across all Baxter products.
- Define the target operating model for the Quality organization, including how quality ownership is split between product engineering teams and a central quality engineering and enablement function.
- Assess the existing automated suites, some of them AI-generated, for test effectiveness, test pyramid balance, flakiness and maintenance cost. Measure effectiveness with methods such as mutation testing, not coverage alone.
- Define test architecture standards per product, prioritized by business risk and customer impact.
- Evaluate and adopt AI-native quality tools and agents across the lifecycle, from requirements to production observability, and build custom ones where commercial options do not fit.
- Design quality controls that scale with AI-generated code, including independent verification of AI-generated tests.
- Define the testing and evaluation approach for agentic and LLM-based product features, including non-deterministic outputs and regression on model, prompt and context changes.
- Define and own CI/CD quality gates with the Development leaders and the Director of IT/DevOps & Security, and a shared release readiness model with Engineering and Product.
- Partner with Product Engineering directors and Architecture to make testability a design requirement.
- Define quality metrics and report them to leadership on a regular cadence.

What Success Looks Like





The sustained standard for this role:
- Product engineering teams own the quality of what they build, and the Quality team sets the bar through standards, tooling and test strategy review.
- The Quality team spends most of its time on quality engineering and tooling, and little on manual execution.
- Automated suites are trusted because their effectiveness is measured, and low-value tests are removed routinely.
- AI-generated code and AI product features pass through verification that does not depend on manual review of every change.
- Defect escape rate and change failure rate trend down over time.
- Engineering teams see quality gates as useful, and quality signals are trusted by engineering leadership and Product.

Talent: Hire, Grow, Retain

- Assesses the current team against the target model and makes decisions on reskilling, role changes and hiring.
- Moves the team from manual execution toward test strategy, automation design, tooling development, and building and supervising AI agents.
- Defines role profiles and career paths for quality engineers, and contributes to 9-box reviews.
- Partners with Product Engineering directors to include quality practices in developer onboarding.

Stakeholder Partnership

InternalExternal
CTOCustomers reporting quality issues or escalations, as needed
Director(s) of Product Engineering and DataAI and testing tooling vendors
Director of IT/DevOps & SecurityCustomer technical teams validating fixes, occasionally
Architecture
Product Management
CX / Support (defect and escalation signal)

What We're Looking For

- 8+ years in quality engineering or test automation, including 3+ years leading a QA or quality engineering team.
- Experience in software product companies, owning quality outcomes for products in production.




- Hands-on experience with agentic development tools such as Claude Code or Cursor, and a practical understanding of how agents work: instructions, context, tool use and MCP, and their failure modes.
- Experience designing test strategy and test architecture, including measuring test effectiveness beyond coverage.
- A track record of evaluating AI quality tooling critically, including identifying weak or redundant AI-generated tests.
- Hands-on experience with a modern automation stack (for example Playwright or Selenium), CI/CD quality gates, and release go/no-go decisions.
- Experience reorganizing a QA team: changing roles, coaching engineers from manual execution toward engineering work, hiring and career pathing.
- Experience in a metrics-driven workplace, such as a PE-backed company, with regular quality reporting to leadership.
- Nice to have: prior experience leading the transformation of a QA organization toward AI-native, development-integrated quality engineering.
- Nice to have: experience testing or evaluating LLM-based and agentic product features.
- Nice to have: experience building internal quality tooling used by other engineering teams.

Core Values and Strengths as a Baxter Engineering Leader

ValueDescription
AI-native mindsetDefault response to a manual, repetitive process is to ask how to automate it or use AI, rather than how to staff it.
RigorDoes not treat a green build as evidence of quality. Verifies that tests, including AI-generated ones, check the right behavior.
Pragmatic risk judgmentKnows where deep coverage is needed (revenue-critical paths, complex business logic, AI features) and where lighter testing is enough.
Critical evaluation of AI toolingStays current on AI-assisted quality tools and evaluates them on evidence, including their failure modes.
Systems and platform thinkingImproves quality through standards, tooling and process design that scale across teams, rather than through individual test cases.
Cross-team influenceGets engineers who do not report to them to write better tests and own quality, through credibility rather than mandate.
Data-drivenUses defect trends, escape rates and production signals to set priorities.

Powered by JazzHR

📌 Director of Quality (India)
🏢 Baxter Planning
📍 India