Senior Manager Quality Assurance For RandD F M D

Job title: Senior Manager Quality Assurance for R&D (f/m/d)

Req ID: 2809

Division: Production Software

Location: Remote within the UK & continental Europe

Short description:

We are seeking a Senior Manager of QA for R&D to lead the quality strategy and execution for our engineering organization. In this strategic leadership role, you will not be writing test cases; you will be architecting the quality organization itself.

You will lead a multi-tiered department of QA Managers, Leads, and Engineers, partnering closely with our Architects. Your mission is to build a scalable, high-performing quality function that aligns with the speed of our delivery teams, ensuring that our rigorous compliance standards (SOC2, ISO, etc.) are met without sacrificing developer velocity.

This role has direct influence over the engineering roadmap and reports straight to the Senior Director Global R&D.

Tasks in detail:

• Organisational leadership: Lead, mentor, and scale a large QA organisation. You will hire top talent, build career development paths for both manual and automation engineers, and manage a team of QA Leads.
• Define the quality strategy: Drive the 1-to-3 year quality roadmap for R&D. You will lead the organizational shift from reactive defect discovery to proactive Quality Engineering.
• Executive cross-functional alignment: Act as the primary counterpart to Engineering and Product Directors. You will navigate complex trade-offs between "Speed to Market" and "Product Reliability," advocating for quality at the executive level.
• Budget & vendor management: Own the QA department OPEX budget. Make strategic decisions on headcount allocation, tooling investments, and manage enterprise vendor contracts (e.g., test environments, device farms).
• Drive quality intelligence: Move beyond tracking "number of bugs found." You will define and present executive KPIs that truly matter, such as Defect Escape Rate, Automation Coverage Density, and Cycle Time. Quality is more than number, it is a Key element of our brand.
• Process governance: Standardize quality processes across dozens of independent agile squads, ensuring a unified, rigorous quality gate is passed before any code hits production.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of progressive experience in Software Quality Assurance, Test Automation, or Software Engineering.
• 5+ years of people management experience, specifically with a track record of managing other managers or large, distributed teams (20+ people).
• Proven experience managing department budgets and enterprise software licensing.
• Experience running QA in agile environments with multiple coordinated release products.
• Professional fluency in English is required; additional proficiency in French or Italian is advantageous.
• Familiarity with modern CI/CD pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and test automation frameworks (e.g., Selenium, Cypress, Playwright), with the ability to effectively collaborate with and guide highly technical Principal Engineers.
• A passion for coaching and organizational design. You know how to upskill manual testers into SDETs and groom junior leads into senior managers.
• Strategic influence: The ability to present data-backed arguments to leadership, including having the courage to halt a release due to systemic risks.
• Conflict resolution: Expert mediation skills to navigate high-stakes alignment between Development, DevOps, and Product Management.
• Executive communication: The ability to translate complex testing bottlenecks into direct business impacts (revenue, churn, support costs).

Hexagon commits in providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, colour, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.