Director, Engineering - Quality
OVERVIEW
Instacart is the classic hyper-growth startup. Intense demand creates pressure and excitement, delivery accelerates to meet the demand, and expansion is fueled by opportunistic and pragmatic approaches to problem-solving. This is the correct way to establish product-market fit and to begin to scale a company, but soon the concerns of owning and shipping software with a significant user base and accumulated technical debt take their toll. This is first seen in bugs and outages. Complexity in the system makes changes more dangerous and unpredictable. But more dangerous than outages is the velocity slow down that starts to occur. Product innovation slows as teams start to get on the endless treadmill of fixing bugs and then fixing the bugs those fixes introduced.
Our Quality organization aims to take a more holistic approach that helps teams make informed decisions on where to best invest their time. By creating feedback loops that give teams reliable signals about Quality, teams can remain independent and maintain velocity by keeping decision making local. Taking this data-driven approach ensures work on quality has a measurable impact. Quality can improve while keeping a balanced view on maintaining product innovation.
The Director of Quality is responsible for making this vision of providing quantitative feedback to teams, and the other elements of our Quality vision above a reality.
- Rollups of the Quality feedback data provided to teams to give a quantitative overview of Quality across Engineering
- Providing frameworks and platforms to assist with the creation of automated regression tests
- Owner of Test Infrastructure including Continuous Integration and Staging environments
- Coordinate larger manual testing efforts through partners
- Drive SDLC and Agile process improvements across engineering
- Embedded experts provide expert exploratory testing and advice on where the team should invest their testing time
- Partnership with product management improves requirements specificity limiting the amount of rework and bug fixing later on
- Design collaboration to help ensure systems can validate their function in Production
ABOUT THE JOB
- Define key metrics that provide reliable quality signals to development teams
- Create the Quality organizational vision and strategy
- Recruit world-class Quality leaders and professionals to execute our strategy
- Establish an automated regression strategy including a strategy for producing frameworks that reduce the cost for creating and maintaining tests for dev teams
- Provide leadership for Quality programs in both our Enterprise business in Toronto and our Consumer business in SF (some travel to Toronto required)
- Define the role of an embedded Quality professional and manage dev team and executive expectations on how their engagement adds value
- Provide SDLC-feedback to development teams and drive process best practices across development
- Own vendor and outsourced testing partner strategy, relationship and organizational engagement
ABOUT YOU
- You have lead Quality programs in the past and have been responsible for hiring and building a team
- You have partnered at the organizational level with senior engineering leaders to define strategies for improving quality
- You have experience creating a metrics-driven approach to quality improvement
- You have run successful embedded QA organizational strategies
- You are organized and can reliably manage a challenging set of competing priorities
- 5-10 years of people management experience