Director of Quality

**BAXTER PLANNING** **Director of Quality** *QA Strategy & Test Automation — Technology* | **Department** | Technology — Baxter Planning | | --- | --- | | **Reports To** | Chief Technology Officer | | **Team** | QA Manager, QA engineers, test automation engineers | | **Location** | Pune, India | | **Employment Type** | FTE | ## **About the Role** This Role owns quality across all of Baxter Planning’s products — not as a downstream gate, but as an engineered, largely automated discipline built into the SDLC. Given Baxter’s legacy defect backlog and the current absence of automated regression coverage, this role is central to derisking the company’s modernization effort and enabling confident, fast delivery. We're looking for a Director of Quality who will leverage AI-assisted testing and quality tooling aggressively — test generation, mutation testing, visual regression, production anomaly detection — rather than scaling quality through headcount alone. | **Context:** *Baxter Planning is a PE-backed (Marlin Equity) service supply chain planning SaaS company.* | | --- | ## **Key Responsibilities** - Own quality strategy and automated test architecture across Prophet (legacy Java 8/SOAP/4GL), Lynx, AI Agents, Data Platform, and Analytics. - Build and scale automated regression coverage where none exists today, prioritized by risk and customer impact. - Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted quality tooling — AI-driven test generation, self-healing test suites, mutation testing, visual/UI regression, log- and production-anomaly-based quality signals — to multiply team capacity rather than scaling headcount linearly. - Define and own quality gates in CI/CD, partnering with the Development leaders/Director of IT/DevOps & Security to embed automated checks directly into the deployment pipeline. - Partner with Product Engineering directors and Architecture to shift quality left — testability as a design requirement, not an afterthought. - Own quality metrics and reporting (defect escape rate, coverage, MTTR on quality issues, regression suite health) as an ongoing operating discipline. - Drive triage and burn-down of the legacy defect backlog, with clear criteria distinguishing ‘fix now’ from ‘won’t fix.’ - Champion a quality culture across engineering — quality as everyone’s job, not just QA’s. ## **What Success Looks Like** *The sustained standard for this role, not a one-time milestone:* - Automated regression coverage keeps expanding and staying healthy — coverage doesn’t quietly rot as the codebase changes. - AI-assisted testing tools are actively reducing manual test-writing and maintenance burden, freeing the team to focus on judgment-heavy testing (exploratory, edge cases, customer scenarios). - Defect escape rate to production trends down consistently, not just after an isolated push. - The legacy defect backlog keeps shrinking as a matter of routine, not periodic cleanup sprints. - Engineering teams treat quality gates as a help, not a blocker — release confidence stays high without heroic manual QA effort. - Quality signals (test results, coverage, production anomalies) are visible and trusted by engineering leadership and Product. ## **Talent: Hire, Grow, Retain** - Hires and builds a QA/test automation team strong in both traditional test engineering and AI-assisted tooling — an evolving skill set, not a static one. - Grows QA engineers toward automation and tooling fluency, shifting the team’s center of gravity from manual execution to automation design and AI tool orchestration. - Partners with Product Engineering directors so quality ownership is shared, not siloed — embeds quality thinking into developer onboarding. - Contributes to 9-box review and career pathing for QA/test engineers. ## **Stakeholder Partnership** | **Internal** | **External** | | --- | --- | | CTO Director(s) of Product Engineering and Data Director of IT/DevOps & Security Architecture Product Management CX / Support (defect and escalation signal) | Cust…