About the Role

Posit is seeking an experienced manager to drive software product quality and to coach the talented, dedicated Quality Assurance Engineers working on our publishing products. These products, which include Posit Connect, Shiny, and Quarto, are designed to make it easy for data scientists to publish high-quality, code-based analyses to tell stories with data and solve real-world problems.

You will be leading both people and process from this position, and you will have direct impact on the design, execution, and quality of one of Posit’s most powerful product suites. At Posit, QA engineers are embedded in the product development teams, so this role is focused on (1) enabling the QA engineers to define, direct, and assess the testing strategy on their product teams, and (2) reinforcing and sustaining a culture that focuses on usability, supportability, and scalability in our software.

This is an active quality role; you will be setting high standards with the product teams, anticipating problems, removing roadblocks, empowering user-centric critical thinking, and collaborating with leaders and engineers across functions to hold ourselves accountable to those high standards.

We do not expect you to be familiar with data science or Posit’s products in advance, but we do require significant Python experience and fluency in this role, since you will be helping the team design features and testing strategies geared toward our Python-based customers and users.

What you will own

• Define and continuously improve the quality standards for our products, in collaboration with QA engineers, developers, product managers, and designers
• Measure, analyze, and report on product quality to identify areas for improvement and enhancement
• Guide the strategic direction and career development of the QA engineers on your team. Hire, onboard, train, and coach new QA engineers.
• Identify ways to make the user experience with our product better – and our employees’ experience with producing our software better – even if the solution is outside the QA department

What you will help with

• Set clear strategies and expectations for the quality of the software being built
• Provide both high-level and day-to-day product team guidance, work prioritization, and release management with team leaders in Product and Development
• Work with other QA managers and the VP of Product Quality to codify Posit’s overall quality approach, and actively inspiring and nurturing user-centric, holistic, cross-product thinking across the entire product organization

What you will teach us

• Good mechanisms for instilling high-quality, user-centric mentality and method in our product teams
• New quality philosophies, testing techniques, product management patterns. or tools. We are a team that likes to learn, and would love to hear about your areas of expertise.

What you will learn

• A deeper understanding of cloud infrastructure and DevOps techniques to effectively deploy and test our software
• An appreciation for data science workflows and some of the tools and approaches used by data scientists.
• The Posit products and how they empower our customers to do effective data science through code.

Within one month, you will…

• Get to know everyone on the product team, and get familiar with our current software development and testing strategies and processes
• Learn our goals related to product quality standards, and become familiar with our test planning, procedures, and frameworks
• Start building relationships with your direct reports, to understand their goals and how they align to the team’s objectives

Within three months, you will…

• Have a general understanding of our users’ objectives and how Posit Connect, Shiny, Quarto, and the rest of our product suite helps them achieve those goals
• Know the high-level design of our test plans, cases, and coverage, and be able to start thinking critically about our product quality standards, strategy and measurement procedures
• Participate in product and feature planning and provide feedback
• Establish trust with your direct reports, be familiar with their individual growth plans, and start looking for opportunities to enable their ongoing career development

Within six months, you will…

• Empower and enable QA engineers to ask the best questions and make the best decisions possible in the service of producing high-quality software
• Augment or start building tools to measure the level of product quality we have achieved, and analyze the outcomes to identify areas for improvement
• Work with leaders across the engineering organization to enhance our approach to product quality, focusing on holistic user experience as the driving force for positive change

Within a year, you will…

• Formulate strategies to ensure high-quality professional testing of our software products
• Work with product managers and engineering leaders to prioritize quality enhancements in both the products and our processes
• Provide career development resources; grow leadership and enable technical achievement across the team