Associate Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering

At PowerSchool, we are a dedicated team of innovators guided by our shared purpose of powering personalized education for students around the world. From the central office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool supports the entire educational ecosystem as the global leader of cloud-based software for K-12 education. Our employees make it all possible, and a career with us means you’re joining a successful team committed to engaging, empowering, and improving the K-12 education experience everywhere.

Team Overview

Our Research & Development (R&D) team is the technical talent at the heart of our product suite, overseeing the product development lifecycle from concept to delivery. From engineering to quality assurance to data science, the R&D team ensures our customers seamlessly use our products and can depend on their consistency.

Description

The Associate Manager, Quality Assurance Engineering, under the general direction of the Director, Quality Assurance Engineering, is responsible for leveraging a deep knowledge of software quality assurance discipline, quality engineering and automation implementations, and enterprise software development best practices to manage a team of quality engineers and drive quality initiatives to ensure highest quality for our product deliverables. This role is responsible for utilizing functional and technical acumen to drive the quality team’s participation in the agile development process, establish relationships, interact with stake holders, and ensure on-time delivery of new product features, enhancements and bug fixes with the highest quality that delight end users.

Essential duties and responsibilities include the following. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Manages the overall work for technically complex areas of testing, including test automation, performance and load testing, analytics and web services testing
• Working closely with product management and dev teams to define sound test strategies, influence architecture, design deliverables and optimize capacity across the QA organization
• Managing and coaching QA Engineers on QA functional and technical areas
• Ability to contribute to automation framework development, writing and reviewing automation code in Java and/or Javascript/Typescript
• Efficiently driving product quality and promoting leading industry best practices meeting QA department goals and objectives
• Represents the QA organization through all phases of the SDLC and closely collaborates with other involved functional areas
• Implements ongoing quality improvement processes working with interdepartmental teams
• Develop and manage QA metrics for performance improvement of all teams
• Anticipates project and release problems and takes corrective action, escalating as needed, to achieve commitments
• Provides effective communication regarding issues, objectives and progress of initiatives and projects
• Manages the planning and execution of product testing efforts, including all associated resources to meet committed delivery dates
• Directly supervises QA Leads and QA Engineers including the preparation and delivery of testing artifacts
• Simultaneously manage multiple projects/efforts while maintaining high quality and delivering on schedule
• Develop technology strategies that align with the organization's vision, mission, and objectives
• Anticipate change and implement an operational plan that is flexible
• Ensure delivery of high quality service, consultation, and product to customers through understanding of business needs and through the development of seamless transition of work processes across departments in the IT division
• Develop and manage relationships throughout the organization to reinforce a culture of service and collaboration.
• Continually re-asses the status quo and consider alternative solutions
• Keep abreast of best practices and apply as relevant to the organization
• Lead change and adoption of new processes and technologies
• Other duties as assigned

Minimum Qualifications

To be considered for and to perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty and responsibility satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill and/or ability required.

Qualifications include:

• 6+ years’ of software development, quality engineering and / or quality assurance experience for enterprise software products
• 2+ years’ of experience in leading quality teams
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related technology field 
• Strong understanding of agile software development life cycle and contemporary software quality assurance processes and automated tools
• Demonstrated skills in project management, resource allocation, problem-solving and decision-making, working with and managing highly technical staff
• Experience managing development of or testing automation of enterprise scale web applications
• Technical expertise in guiding the team in developing testing and automation strategies.
• Ability to review automation code written by the team and provide technical feedback to improve code quality and coverage.
• Experience managing automated testing, performance, load and stress testing and other types of highly technical testing
• Prior experience coding in Java, SQL and web technologies such as HTML, XML, JavaScript, jQuery and CSS3 as well as automation technologies such as Junit, Selenium and TestNG
• Strong analytical skills and experience with implementation and administration of Quality Assurance metrics, such as defect profiles, test execution progress and results reports
• Proven ability to drive quality improvement across the SDLC based on quality results
• Strong ability to handle a heavy workload with multiple projects and frequent interruptions
• Strong ability to work in a changing, dynamic environment
• Ability to mentor and coach employees in their performance and career growth.

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with AI based product development/testing
• Experience with AI tools and basic understanding of AI concepts and prompt engineering 

EEO Commitment

PowerSchool is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. PowerSchool is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. Our inclusive culture empowers PowerSchoolers to deliver the best results for our customers. We not only celebrate the diversity of our workforce, we celebrate the diverse ways we work. If you have a disability and need an accommodation regarding our recruiting process, please let us know by emailing accomodations@powerschool.com.

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