Lead Associate - Quality

Department: IT

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Pune

Description

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, support and develop Test Analysts and other quality practitioners, setting clear expectations and providing coaching, feedback and practical guidance.
• Champion shared ownership of quality within cross-functional teams and help squads make evidence-based decisions about coverage, risk and release readiness.
• Define and promote proportionate quality standards, testing practices and ways of working, ensuring they are understood and applied consistently.
• Build effective working relationships with Product, Business Analysis, Engineering, Delivery, Operations and other stakeholders.

• Develop and maintain risk-based test strategies and plans aligned to business outcomes, technical change, delivery approach and project constraints.
• Assess change impact, dependencies and quality risks early; define suitable test levels, types, environments, data, tooling, entry and exit criteria, and evidence requirements.
• Ensure test coverage is traceable to requirements, acceptance criteria, risks and critical business processes without creating unnecessary administration.
• Plan regression, integration, system, exploratory, non-functional and user acceptance testing as appropriate to the change.
• Monitor testing progress, quality indicators, defects and residual risk, communicating concise and actionable information to relevant stakeholders.
• Contribute quality evidence and recommendations to collective release-readiness decisions; escalate material gaps or risks clearly and promptly.

• Personally design, execute and maintain tests when needed, using manual and/or automated techniques appropriate to the context.
• Undertake exploratory, functional, integration, regression and other relevant testing of new and existing functionality.
• Create clear, maintainable test cases, charters, data and evidence at a level proportionate to the risk and delivery need.
• Identify, isolate, reproduce and document defects; support root-cause analysis and verify fixes.
• Use relevant tools to inspect applications, interfaces, APIs, data and logs where required to investigate behaviour and build confidence.
• Review test assets and results produced by others, helping ensure coverage is meaningful, efficient and focused on risk.

• Evaluate where automation will provide sustainable value and where manual or exploratory testing is more appropriate.
• Contribute to the design, implementation or maintenance of automated checks where this matches the individual’s skills and the needs of the team.
• Work with engineers to improve testability and embed appropriate quality checks within the development and delivery lifecycle.
• Identify bottlenecks, duplication and gaps in the QA process and implement pragmatic improvements to quality, speed, coverage and transparency.
• Evaluate and recommend suitable testing tools and techniques, keeping current with relevant developments in software quality.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent applied experience.
• 10–15 years of automation and quality assurance testing experience.
• Background in web integration testing preferred.
• Strong experience in manual and automation testing, with expertise in Selenium, Playwright, frontend UI automation, backend/API automation, and end-to-end testing.
• Proven experience leading QA activities for complex products and Agile delivery teams.
• Strong test strategy, test design, exploratory testing, regression planning, and defect management skills.
• Ability to apply risk-based testing approaches and make pragmatic quality decisions.
• Experience coaching and mentoring QA engineers and driving quality best practices.
• Strong understanding of Agile, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong business awareness with the ability to evaluate customer and operational impact.
• Ability to learn new domains quickly and collaborate effectively across cross-functional teams.

• Experience testing APIs, integrations, data flows or databases, using tools such as Postman and SQL or equivalent.
• Experience with test-management, defect-management, delivery and collaboration tools.
• Experience with automation frameworks, continuous integration pipelines, performance testing, observability or application monitoring.
• Experience working in insurance, financial services or another regulated environment.
• A relevant testing qualification such as ISTQB Foundation Level, or equivalent applied experience.