• Define and execute the long-term Quality Engineering vision, aligned with product and engineering goals. • Establish an automation-first culture, ensuring test automation is embedded into CI/CD and development workflows. • Drive strategic initiatives in performance testing, security validation, observability, and production readiness. • Own the automation roadmap across UI, API, performance, integration, and end-to-end testing. • Increase automation coverage and ensure automation is a gatekeeper for every release. • Strengthen CI/CD pipelines by integrating AI-driven test creation, self-healing automation, and continuous validation. • Identify and introduce the right automation tools (Playwright, Postman, JMeter, etc.). • Implement and enhance observability practices using logs, metrics, traces, and synthetic monitoring. • Partner with DevOps/SRE to improve error budgets, reliability scorecards, SLO/SLA tracking, and early incident detection. • Drive real-time production quality visibility through dashboards (Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Elastic). • Lead RCA processes and implement systemic fixes to reduce repeat issues/incidents. • Build a monthly Quality Insights report for leadership with actionable recommendations. • Use metrics to optimize team performance, raise quality standards, and guide investment decisions. • Strengthen release governance with quality gates, smoke automation, performance checks, and risk-based testing. • Ensure predictable, stable, and low-defect releases across environments. • Drive continuous improvements in regression cycles, test planning, automation strategy, and environment readiness. • Collaborate with Engineering, Product, UX, DevOps, and Support to embed quality early in the lifecycle. • Influence technical designs by advocating for testability, reliability, and observability. • Serve as the Quality representative in roadmap discussions, quarterly planning, and architecture reviews. • Lead, mentor, and grow a team of QA engineers, SDETs, automation architects, and analysts. • Build a culture of accountability, innovation, and continuous learning. • Enable the team with training in automation, performance, observability tools, and AI-driven testing.