Description

Lucas Systems has a key leadership role available to provide vision and functional leadership for all activities related to Quality. Responsibilities span the full software development lifecycle, instilling and championing best practices in user-focused software quality assurance, and ensuring high performance and high availability products and projects that exceed customer quality standards. The ideal candidate is an established, self-motivated leader with deep experience and a track record of successfully leading teams and leveraging repeatable processes to deliver high value solutions. 

The Director of QA will align quality across the organization, instilling quality at every step in the process and within every member of Lucas, while analyzing and defining the answers to questions such as: 

• Are we leveraging best practices in quality software development across the organization? 
• Do our user stories and acceptance criteria align with our intention and customer success? 
• Do we have the right balance between functional and acceptance testing? 

Although domain experience is not required, the desire to learn the domain is expected. By understanding our solutions and warehousing and distribution processes in detail, the Director will be best equipped to help the QA team think through operational scenarios and write tests to uncover gaps in functionality or areas that may pose usability problems in a warehouse. 

In this role, you will: 

• Provide overall functional QA leadership and vision for Lucas. 
• Work with the Executive Team to build and execute on a strategic approach to, and standards for, quality spanning the product and project lifecycle.
• Work closely with the development teams to design testing strategies and integrate testing into the development process.
• Provide mentorship to support the quality discipline across the entire team.
• Evaluate Lucas’ current-state quality approach and results.
• Define and report on quality metrics. 
• Define and implement innovative approaches to improve quality through the introduction of new technologies, systems, methods and controls used to improve quality and enhance project agility using the appropriate development life cycle.
• Lead ongoing process improvement efforts to ensure the software development methodologies are effective, efficient, standardized and integrated.
• Recruit and manage a highly functional and motivated QA team.
• Provide budgetary estimates for all QA efforts. 

Within your first six months, you will work on: 

• Building a cohesive and collaborative quality function across all development efforts.
• Further developing and facilitating the quality effort for the entire organization. 
• Reducing the amount of manual functional testing where applicable.
• Improving the overall quality of development work before it gets to QA.

About Us 

Lucas Systems helps companies transform their distribution center operations and continuously adapt to changing market dynamics. We dramatically increase worker productivity, operational agility, accuracy, and reduce the need for labor. Lucas solutions are built on 25-plus years of deep process expertise and smart software using AI-based optimization technologies. Our solutions feature Jennifer, the brain, voice, and orchestration engine that drives performance improvement gains. We help customers make the smartest moves at the lowest cost with Jennifer. 

Founded in 1998, Lucas is a growing and consistently profitable organization with an expanding global customer base and offices in North America and Europe. We offer a dynamic, collaborative, innovative and entrepreneurial work environment that continues to create opportunities for both personal and professional growth for high-performing individuals throughout the United States and Europe. Our culture has been as carefully managed as our growth and our products. We believe in what we do, as much as we believe in each other. We believe in rewarding great thinking and initiative. We attract high-quality people who like to work hard, and they stay with us for many years.

Requirements

• BS or MS Degree in Computer Science, Information Science or related with equivalent experience
• 7 or more years of QA experience, including 3 or more years in a management role with demonstrated increased leadership (ideally within a software company) 
• Experience leading quality and test engineering functions for large-scale products/services across server, web/SaaS, desktop, and mobile platforms 
• Proven track record of delivering results in an Agile environment. Expertise in Agile quality assurance approaches such as continuous integration, automated unit testing, test-driven development, design patterns, domain-driven design, and code refactoring
• Experience with test automation and frameworks
• Experience recruiting, leading and developing high-quality teams that produce results 
• Proven success establishing and maintaining quality development best practices 
• Effective and inspiring people manager with a proven ability to get the best out of people, set and communicate clear goals, measure results, hold people accountable, be an effective coach to drive teams to perform at a higher level, and foster a learning environment
• Very strong communication skills, including an ability to communicate effectively to technical and non-technical stakeholders 
• Experience supporting complex, fast moving development initiatives 
• Detail-oriented with strong organizational skills
• Ability to work well under deadlines to meet commitments in a changing environment while managing and prioritizing multiple projects simultaneously 
• Demonstrated ability to build consensus, negotiate resolutions, and garner respect from others to work internally across all teams as well as externally with partners, customers and vendors 
• Innate curiosity and the ability to dissect and solve problems

Preferred

• Prior warehousing or distribution experience is ideal.