Head of Quality Engineering (QA)

Siftstack Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Marina Del Rey, CA

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Own Sift's overall quality strategy and serve as the accountable owner for release quality sign-off across all customer-facing products, including web, desktop, and backend systems.
• Build and lead the QA function from a near-blank slate, scaling to approximately 30 people, with the majority being external QA vendors managed through third-party partners and a potential internal core of up to ten over time.
• Select, onboard, and manage external QA vendor teams, enforcing clear quality bars, throughput expectations, and service-level agreements (SLAs).
• Establish formal test planning for every major feature and release, including comprehensive regression suites, and enforce a mandatory QA pass for all user-facing products prior to deployment.
• Organize testing into two models: embedded squad testing for ongoing feature development and dedicated release testing for end-to-end validation, with test leads coordinating coverage across both.
• Stand up a structured customer bug intake, triage, and prioritization workflow to replace ad hoc issue handling, ensuring bugs are systematically caught, ranked, and resolved.
• Apply AI to accelerate QA processes, including drafting test plans, generating test cases, automating documentation, and building internal tooling such as admin utilities for test account creation and test condition setup.
• Partner with engineering teams to expand automated testing over time while maintaining investment in manual testing where human judgment is critical, particularly for user experience (UX).
• Define, track, and report on quality metrics and service-level objectives to engineering leadership and, when necessary, directly to customers.
• Coach engineers on self-testing practices and embed quality ownership throughout the product development lifecycle, making quality a shared property rather than a final checkpoint.
• Serve as the single point of accountability for the quality of all releases, with responsibility for ensuring customer expectations are met across mission-critical systems such as rockets, satellites, autonomous vehicles, and defense platforms.
• Operate in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment, building structure and process where none currently exists, and making strategic decisions on where to apply automation, AI, and manual testing.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering stakeholders to integrate quality practices early and continuously into the development workflow.
• Maintain compliance with ITAR and EAR regulations by ensuring all QA activities and team members meet U.S. person eligibility requirements.

🎯 Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience in QA with senior leadership experience equivalent to principal or director level.
• At least 3 years of experience managing people, including building and developing test leads and QA teams.
• Direct experience managing external or outsourced QA vendor teams and delivering strong outcomes through them.
• Strong QA fundamentals including test planning, test case design, regression strategy, bug triage, and release management.
• Hands-on experience testing frontend systems (web and desktop) and backend systems.
• AI-forward approach to QA, using modern tooling to automate test definition, documentation, and internal utilities while knowing when manual testing is required.

🏖️ Benefits

• Salary range of $200,000 - $250,000 per year.
• Equity compensation.
• Comprehensive benefits package.
• Opportunity to work in-person twice weekly (Mondays and Thursdays) at headquarters in Marina Del Rey, CA, with a full-week team retreat every two months.
• Relocation support available for candidates willing to move to Los Angeles or work from the San Francisco office.
• Eligibility for U.S. persons only, including U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, or protected individuals under ITAR/EAR regulations.

Skills & Technologies

Onsite

$200k-250k

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Siftstack Inc.

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About Siftstack Inc.

Siftstack Inc. provides an AI observability platform that monitors, traces, and evaluates large language model applications. Its service ingests logs, metrics, and traces to detect anomalies, surface root causes, and quantify quality, enabling engineering teams to maintain reliable, compliant, and cost-effective AI systems in production. The company targets enterprises deploying generative AI and offers dashboards, alerting, and integrations with popular LLM frameworks and cloud providers.

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