About the job
You will be leading the transformation of the Quality Assurance function at Ink Innovation, reporting directly to the CTO. Ink builds mission-critical aviation technology — AURA, our AI-powered passenger intelligence platform, and ZERO, our biometric processing system — products where failure is not an option. This is not a traditional QA management role. Your mandate is to eliminate manual testing entirely and architect a fully AI-driven, automated quality engineering organisation. You will embed intelligent quality from code commit to production deployment, with zero human-gated regression cycles. You will own the quality bar across the entire engineering organisation and make quality a structural, measurable property of everything we ship.
Key Responsibilities:
- Architect and lead the full transition from manual to AI-driven automated testing — targeting 100%
automation coverage within 90 days, using platforms such as testRigor, Mabl, or Functionize.
- Build and own a fully automated CI/CD quality gate: every commit tested, every regression caught before staging — no human-gated test cycles.
- Design end-to-end automated test coverage across AURA, ZERO, and all platform services — including API, performance, load, and security testing scenarios.
- Shift quality left — embed QA into sprint ceremonies, architecture reviews, and feature design so defects are prevented, not caught.
- Define and own QA KPIs: defect escape rate, automation coverage %, mean time to detect, and release confidence score — reported at CTO, CPO, and client level.
- Ensure automated validation of biometric processing flows (ZERO) and passenger intelligence pipelines (AURA) against SLA-aligned SLOs — covering performance thresholds, not just functional correctness.
- Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of QA engineers. Recruit for automation-first profiles; set the technical bar and provide career development support.
- Collaborate with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Operations to integrate automated QA into agile workflows, sprint ceremonies, and release pipelines.
- Act as the primary quality advocate across the organisation — influencing stakeholders at every level and driving a culture where quality is a competitive advantage, not a compliance gate.
Required qualifications:
- 10+ years in QA engineering; 3+ years leading QA teams in enterprise software environments
- Proven track record eliminating manual regression testing at scale and replacing it with AI-native automation in production
- Experience with mission-critical software in regulated or high-uptime environments (aviation, fintech, healthcare, or similar)
- Deep experience with CI/CD pipelines and TDD/BDD in agile development environments
Technical Skills:
- AI-native and no-code automation platforms: testRigor, Mabl, Functionize, or equivalent with self-healing test capabilities
- Traditional automation stack: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, REST Assured; performance tools: k6, Gatling
- CI/CD integration: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes; experience implementingautomated quality gates in release pipelines
- Defect and test management tools: Jira, Azure DevOps, or equivalent
- Ability to define, track, and present quality metrics and KPIs at engineering and executive level
Leadership & Personal Attributes:
- Builder mindset — you design systems, not processes; you automate before youdocument
- Data-driven — quality decisions backed by metrics and automation signals, not intuition or manual observation
- Strong stakeholder communication — able to present quality strategy with conviction to executive and client audiences
- Fluent in English and Spanish