Delta6Labs - Head - IT Quality Assurance

Head of Quality Assurance We are hiring a Head of Quality Assurance to own quality across everything Delta6Labs ships. You will lead an established QA organisation of 15+ engineers embedded across product squads, and you will report directly to the CTO / VP Engineering & Product Development as part of the engineering leadership team. Qualification: B.E. / B.Tech / M.C.A. in Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline. Equivalent practical experience considered. Quality strategy and accountability: - Own the end-to-end quality strategy for all Delta6Labs platforms - exchanges, wallets, trading systems, and white-label deployments and translate it into a roadmap with clear quarterly outcomes. - Define and enforce release-readiness criteria, entry and exit gates, and go/no-go authority. - Establish a risk-based test strategy that concentrates effort where financial, regulatory and reputational exposure is highest. - Partner with Product, Engineering, DevSecOps and Security so quality is designed in from requirements through to production monitoring. Test automation and quality engineering: - Own the design and evolution of our automation frameworks across API, service, integration, data and UI layers. - Drive automated regression suites into CI/CD so that every merge and every release candidate is gated on evidence. - Build and own performance, load, soak and stress testing for high-throughput, low-latency paths. - Establish contract testing between services and dependable test-data management across environments. - Drive data-integrity and reconciliation testing across ledgers, balances, fee calculations and transaction histories. - Partner with Security and DevSecOps on security regression, dependency and configuration checks. - Champion shift-left practices: testability reviews at design time, unit and integration coverage standards, static analysis, feature flags, and safe progressive rollout. Team leadership and development: - Lead, coach and grow a QA organisation of 8+ engineers; set clear ownership boundaries between squad-embedded QA and a central quality-engineering function. - Own hiring end to end - define the bar, build the interview loop, and recruit manual, automation and SDET talent. - Define career ladders, competency frameworks, goal setting and performance reviews for the QA function. - Build a culture of engineering rigour and psychological safety, where defects are data, blameless root-cause analysis is routine, and escalation is expected. - Act as the senior quality voice with clients and stakeholders. Process, metrics and continuous improvement: - Define the defect lifecycle, severity and priority taxonomy, triage cadence and response SLAs. - Instrument quality and report it on a fixed cadence: escaped-defect rate, defect density, automation coverage and stability, flake rate, mean time to detect and recover, regression cycle time, and release-failure rate. - Run structured root-cause analysis on production incidents and close every loop with permanent test coverage. - Rationalise tooling, environments and test infrastructure against cost and value. - Maintain the traceability and documentation trail that our ISO obligations, client audits and security reviews depend on. What you must bring: - 10+ years in software quality assurance, including 4+ years leading QA teams, with direct experience managing a team of eight or more engineers. - Demonstrated ownership of quality for a production financial, payments, trading or otherwise high-transaction-volume platform. - Deep, hands-on API and backend testing expertise: REST and WebSocket, authentication and authorisation flows, pagination and rate limiting, idempotency, error contracts, and database-level validation with confident SQL. - A real automation engineering background - you have built or substantially rebuilt a framework yourself. Strong in at least one of Python, JavaScript/TypeScript or Java, with tools such as pytest, Playwright, REST Assured, Postman/Newman or equivalents. - Proven ownership of performance and load testing using k6, JMeter, Gatling, Locust or similar. - Experience testing microservices and event-driven systems, including Kafka or RabbitMQ-style messaging. - A track record of hiring, mentoring and retaining QA engineers. - Excellent written and verbal communication. Nice to have: - Direct experience with cryptocurrency exchanges, digital-asset custody or trading systems. - Familiarity with custody and wallet infrastructure, KYC/AML vendors and blockchain analytics. - Exposure to blockchain and smart-contract testing concepts. - Experience in a multi-tenant or white-label delivery model. - Working knowledge of security testing fundamentals and fintech-relevant standards - OWASP, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001. - Prior experience in an organisation delivering both product and client services. - Relevant certifications (ISTQB Advanced Level, CSTE) - welcome, though never a substitute for demonstrated work.