Director, Quality Engineering and Automation

Company Description

QAD is a leading provider of ERP solutions purpose-built for manufacturing industries — automotive, life sciences, food & beverage, high tech, and industrial. Serving thousands of global manufacturers, QAD's Adaptive Manufacturing Cloud helps companies operate with greater precision, agility, and intelligence.

Enterprise software is entering a third era. The first gave manufacturers a System of Record — ERP that answered 'what do we have and what did we commit to?' The second gave them Data Infrastructure — the ability to move, analyse, and query that data at scale. The third era is domain-specific intelligence: AI agents that can act autonomously on manufacturing data, but only if that data has been given the context, relationships, and governed rules that allow an agent to reason correctly.

Job Description

This director changes how QAD builds and proves quality in Adaptive ERP. The goal is continuous, automated evidence that every release, patch, and update works in environments that look like customers' own, not a QA stage at the end. This leader owns quality standards, regression automation, and release gates, and has the authority to stop a release that does not meet them. We are not looking for a QA manager. We need a leader who will reshape how the organization thinks about quality.

Responsibilities

- Build and lead the central Quality Engineering organization: strategy, staffing, capability, and results.
- Define quality standards and evidence-based release gates covering installation, configuration, upgrades, patches, integrations, and end-to-end business flows.
- Hold the authority to block a release that fails those gates.
- Lead regression automation: one framework, a suite covering the defined test surface, and a measurable coverage ramp, integrated into development and deployment pipelines.
- Qualify releases in customer-representative environments and configurations.
- Apply AI across the quality lifecycle, including test generation, maintenance, and defect analysis.
- Make quality visible with data: coverage, escaped defects, regression results, and release readiness.
- Own the quality assessment against agreed release gates and escalate unmet criteria through the release decision process.

Qualifications

Required

- Senior quality engineering leadership on large enterprise SaaS products, including organizational and process transformation. ERP experience is not required.
- Expertise in automation architecture, continuous testing, CI/CD, branch strategy, and risk-based qualification.
- Practical experience applying AI to testing or software engineering, with evidence it worked.
- Data-driven judgment and the confidence to push back on senior leaders, including the SVP, when quality standards are not met.

Preferred

- Experience testing ERP or similarly complex enterprise applications.
- Experience qualifying repeatable upgrades and patches in controlled configurations.

What success looks like

Release decisions made on evidence, continuous regression running on every change, rising coverage of critical customer flows, and a sustained drop in escaped defects.

Additional Information

- Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
- Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
- Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
- An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
- Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set

About QAD:

QAD  |  Redzone  is redefining manufacturing and supply chains through its intelligent, adaptive platform that connects people, processes, and data into a single System of Action. With three core pillars — Redzone (frontline empowerment), Adaptive Applications (the intelligent backbone), and Champion AI (Agentic AI for manufacturing) — QAD | Redzone helps manufacturers operate with  Champion Pace , achieving measurable productivity, resilience, and growth in just 90 days.

QAD is committed to ensuring that every employee feels they work in an environment that values their contributions, respects their unique perspectives and provides opportunities for growth regardless of background. QAD’s DEI program is driving higher levels of diversity, equity and inclusion so that employees can bring their whole self to work.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.