Senior Technical Quality Lead

Summary

Key responsibilities

• Own the quality vision, strategy, and roadmap for core airline platforms (shopping, booking, PNR/Order, ticketing, ancillaries, servicing, disruption).
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Architecture and SRE to embed quality by design into architecture, design, and delivery.
• Design and evolve test architecture and automation frameworks for API, integration and UI.
• Set and refine quality gates in CI/CD (unit, integration, contract, E2E, performance, security, regression) to enable safe, frequent releases.
• Define and drive non-functional testing (performance, scalability, reliability, failover, chaos, resilience) for critical airline flows.
• Lead test strategies for complex airline integrations (GDS, NDC aggregators, PSS, payments, revenue management).
• Ensure robust test data, environments and observability (logs, metrics, traces) to speed up defects' detection and root-cause analysis.
• Ensure key regression and high-risk flows are continuously automated in the pipeline.
• Define, track and communicate quality KPIs (defect leakage, regression rate, coverage, flakiness, MTTD/MTTR, release stability) and drive improvements from them.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to Senior QEs, SDETs and developers on test design, automation and quality practices.
• Lead cross-team quality initiatives (shared frameworks, contract testing, API mocking, reusable airline test libraries).
• Influence product and release decisions by clearly explaining quality risks, coverage and trade-offs to senior stakeholders.
• Promote a continuous improvement culture with post-release reviews and learning from incidents to strengthen systemic quality.

Skills

• and competencies
• Airline / travel domain
• Deep experience with airline distribution (NDC, EDIFACT, GDS), PNR / Order and ticketing lifecycle (incl.
• EMDs, ancillaries, fare rules, reissues/refunds, disruption), and integrations with PSS, GDS, NDC aggregators, payment, loyalty and DCS systems.
• Test architecture & automation
• Designs and builds automation frameworks for API, service and UI tests, using at least one modern language (Java, Kotlin, C#, JS/TS, Python), including contract testing, mocks/virtual services and test harnesses for microservices.
• CI/CD & DevOps quality
• Strong experience embedding tests into CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, Argo), working with Docker/Kubernetes, and defining quality gates and automated checks for safe, frequent releases.
• Non-functional quality
• Hands-on in performance, scalability and reliability testing (e.g.
• JMeter, Gatling, k6), familiar with SRE practices (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, incidents, post-mortems) and using observability (metrics, logs, traces) to drive improvements.
• Leadership & influence
• Operates at Principal level, sets quality strategy across teams, mentors Senior QEs/SDETs, and leads cross-team quality initiatives and technical discussions.
• Delivery & stakeholder management
• Works effectively in agile setups with multiple squads and global stakeholders, translating business and operational needs into clear test strategies and risk-based coverage, and communicating risks and status clearly.
• Mindset & behaviours
• Data-driven, customer-focused, aware of operational impact on passengers and agents, and constantly learning new airline standards, testing tools and quality practices.
• Strong presentation skills
• You will need to present results, strategies, priorities.