Enterprise Test & Quality Lead

AXIS Capital · New York City · $180/day (stated in the posting)

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This is your opportunity to join AXIS Capital – a trusted global provider of specialty lines insurance and reinsurance.  We stand apart for our outstanding client service, intelligent risk taking and superior risk adjusted returns for our shareholders. We also proudly maintain an entrepreneurial, disciplined and ethical corporate culture.  As a member of AXIS, you join a team that is among the best in the industry.

At AXIS, we believe that we are only as strong as our people. We strive to create an inclusive and welcoming culture where employees of all backgrounds and from all walks of life feel comfortable and empowered to be themselves. This means that we bring our whole selves to work. 

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic, including age, color, disability, ethnicity, gender identity, marital status, national origin, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any basis prohibited by the laws that govern its operations.

We are seeking an Enterprise Test & Quality Lead to provide end-to-end ownership of testing across development, QA, UAT, and release activities. This role is accountable for defining and governing the test strategy, coordinating testing across multiple concurrent delivery teams, improving environment and test data readiness, and ensuring that releases meet agreed quality and business acceptance criteria. The role is particularly important in a delivery context where shared environments, constrained non-production data, and cross-team dependencies require disciplined planning, strong stakeholder management, and clear operational control.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end test management lifecycle across Unit Testing, System Integration Testing, QA, UAT, regression testing, and release readiness.

• Define and drive a Quality Engineering strategy embedding automated testing across the SDLC including “shift-left” and “shift-right” practices.

• Define and maintain the overall test strategy, test plans, phase entry and exit criteria, acceptance thresholds, and defect management approach. Work and align with incumbent vendor to align QA to this overall strategy.

• Define and enforce automated quality gates within CI/CD pipelines.

• Coordinate testing across multiple concurrent scrum teams, ensuring alignment of delivery schedules, dependencies, and release milestones.

• Define an environment strategy that enables parallel team execution, minimizes contention, and supports continuous testing.

• Ownership of Test Data Governance Framework

• o Ensure adherence and support from DPO / IRM / Privacy

• Own the approach to Test Data Management, including data readiness, lineage, masking or obfuscation controls, and interim solutions required to support testing safely and effectively.

• Partner with QA leads to define test scenarios, test cases, regression coverage, and the appropriate level of automation, including use of tools such as Tosca to deliver ROI driven automation, decisions on what to automate and coverage targets. 

• KPI Management of QA vendor

• SLA tracking

• Capability and skill matrix optimization.

• Trend analysis of defect origin (code, data, environment, design) leading to systemic issue elimination

• Work with Product Owners and business stakeholders to secure UAT participation, define UAT scripts and acceptance criteria, and manage UAT execution to completion.

• The Test Manager should be a critical input into the release management go / no go stage gate decisions.

• Manage defect triage, retest cycles, and regression planning to ensure efficient resolution and minimal disruption to completed testing.

• Provide decision grade insights on test progress, risks, defect trends, environment readiness, and overall release confidence to project and executive stakeholders.

• Drive continuous improvement in test practices, with a focus on moving from reactive or waterfall-like testing toward a more agile, disciplined, and scalable operating model.

• Define and oversee post release validation strategies, including observability, monitoring, and production quality feedback loops.

• Skills and Experience

• Proven experience in Test Management, QA leadership, or quality engineering leadership within complex technology delivery environments.

• Strong understanding of end-to-end software testing practices across unit, integration, system, regression, data lineage and user acceptance testing.

• Experience managing testing in agile delivery environments with multiple concurrent teams and shared environments.

• Practical knowledge of test automation and engineering led strategy and tooling, ideally including Tosca or comparable platforms, especially AI driven technologies and processes.

• Strong understanding of environment management and test data management, including handling of sensitive data in non-production environments.

• Ability to define quality gates, release readiness criteria, and structured defect management processes.

• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work across engineering, QA, product, operations, and business teams.

• Excellent planning, coordination, and communication skills, with the ability to manage competing priorities and delivery risk.

• Experience in regulated or control-conscious environments is highly desirable.

• Experience of integrating testing into DevOps pipelines and familiarity with release orchestration and production validation techniques.

• Experience of operating in SAFe (scaled agile) frameworks

Success Measures

• Improved coordination and predictability across QA and UAT cycles including continuous validation and early user involvement.

• Reduction in defects caused by environment or data issues rather than true functional failures.

• Clear and consistently applied phase entry, exit, and acceptance criteria.

• Increased confidence in release readiness and reduced rework or defect recycling.

• Greater use of automation and regression coverage to support faster retest cycles.

• Stronger governance, visibility, and accountability for end-to-end testing outcomes.

Key Interfaces
This role will work closely with Development Leads, QA Leads, Product Owners, Business UAT representatives, Environment and Release Management teams, Data and Privacy stakeholders, and senior programme or technology leadership.
Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.

• Relevant testing or quality certifications such as ISTQB Advanced Test Manager or equivalent are desirable.

• Experience in insurance, financial services, or other highly regulated delivery environments would be advantageous.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

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