Director of Quality

BAXTER PLANNING
Director of Quality
QA Strategy & Test Automation — Technology

• Own quality strategy and automated test architecture across Prophet (legacy Java 8/SOAP/4GL), Lynx, AI Agents, Data Platform, and Analytics.
• Build and scale automated regression coverage where none exists today, prioritized by risk and customer impact.
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted quality tooling — AI-driven test generation, self-healing test suites, mutation testing, visual/UI regression, log- and production-anomaly-based quality signals — to multiply team capacity rather than scaling headcount linearly.
• Define and own quality gates in CI/CD, partnering with the Development leaders/Director of IT/DevOps & Security to embed automated checks directly into the deployment pipeline.
• Partner with Product Engineering directors and Architecture to shift quality left — testability as a design requirement, not an afterthought.
• Own quality metrics and reporting (defect escape rate, coverage, MTTR on quality issues, regression suite health) as an ongoing operating discipline.
• Drive triage and burn-down of the legacy defect backlog, with clear criteria distinguishing ‘fix now’ from ‘won’t fix.’
• Champion a quality culture across engineering — quality as everyone’s job, not just QA’s.

• Automated regression coverage keeps expanding and staying healthy — coverage doesn’t quietly rot as the codebase changes.
• AI-assisted testing tools are actively reducing manual test-writing and maintenance burden, freeing the team to focus on judgment-heavy testing (exploratory, edge cases, customer scenarios).
• Defect escape rate to production trends down consistently, not just after an isolated push.
• The legacy defect backlog keeps shrinking as a matter of routine, not periodic cleanup sprints.
• Engineering teams treat quality gates as a help, not a blocker — release confidence stays high without heroic manual QA effort.
• Quality signals (test results, coverage, production anomalies) are visible and trusted by engineering leadership and Product.

• Hires and builds a QA/test automation team strong in both traditional test engineering and AI-assisted tooling — an evolving skill set, not a static one.
• Grows QA engineers toward automation and tooling fluency, shifting the team’s center of gravity from manual execution to automation design and AI tool orchestration.
• Partners with Product Engineering directors so quality ownership is shared, not siloed — embeds quality thinking into developer onboarding.
• Contributes to 9-box review and career pathing for QA/test engineers.

• 10+ years in quality engineering / test automation, including 5+ years leading a QA or test automation team.
• Direct experience building automated regression coverage into a legacy codebase with limited existing test coverage — not just greenfield test architecture.
• Hands-on familiarity with AI-assisted testing and quality tooling (AI-driven test generation, self-healing tests, mutation testing, visual regression, anomaly detection), and a track record of evaluating tools critically rather than adopting on hype.
• Hands on experience with automation stack - Playwright, Selenium, and CI/CD tooling
• Ownership of release readiness and go/no-go decisions
• Experience owning CI/CD quality gates and partnering with DevOps/Development/platform teams to embed checks into deployment pipelines.
• Comfort operating in a legacy enterprise stack (Java, SOAP, and/or 4GL-era systems) undergoing active modernization.
• Track record of building and scaling a QA organization — hiring, coaching engineers from manual execution toward automation, and career pathing.
• Experience working in a PE-backed or otherwise metrics-driven environment where quality outcomes (defect escape rate, coverage, MTTR) are reported to leadership on a regular cadence.