Director, Quality Engineering & Developer Experience
Summary
Leads quality engineering and platform reliability for a SaaS travel-tech company, defining testing strategies and scaling shared infrastructure like Temporal, Kafka, and Cassandra.
Who: You! And the rest of the Engineering department, QA & DevEx team, & their cross-functional partners.
What: A Director of Quality Engineering & Developer Experience position with outstanding leadership and influence.
When: ASAP! We are looking to hire and onboard a new hire as soon as we find the right person for the job. Exciting work awaits!
Where: Our office hub location of Palo Alto, CA – you will be required to be in office 1+ days per week in alignment with our office work policy.
Why: We're looking for a leader to elevate engineering quality and developer experience as Spotnana continues to scale.
How (to land the job!): Our interview process includes an initial call with the recruiter and four conversations with direct team members and cross-functional partners focused on technical depth and leadership.
The day-to-day:
Quality Engineering
- Lead and grow a world-class functional QA team, establishing and continuously improving testing practices across the organization
- Own defect prevention end-to-end — from PRD ingestion to production release — ensuring new features ship with high confidence
- Partner closely with product and engineering teams to translate complex product requirements into comprehensive, risk-based test plans with full feature coverage
- Drive the adoption of internal automation tooling and TestRail to scale QA coverage without scaling headcount linearly
- Define and track quality metrics — defect containment, escape, and rejection rates — using data to continuously raise the bar
- Champion a shift-left testing culture, embedding quality early in the development lifecycle rather than as a gate at the end
Developer Experience for External Partners
- Own and evolve Spotnana's external-facing developer platform — including the self-serve developer portal, API documentation, and integration tooling — that external partners depend on to build and maintain integrations
- Build and lead a partner enablement function that operates as a core horizontal capability, enabling every partner integration to move faster without requiring one-off engineering support from product pods
- Partner with product engineering, solutions/partner engineering, and product management leads to architect the right operating model for external developer experience across the org
- Serve as a technical thought leader and escalation point for partner integration issues, API design decisions, and developer experience architecture
Leadership & Cross-Functional Impact
- Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent across both QA and platform functions
- Manage vendor relationships and tooling contracts relevant to your domain
- Serve as a standard-bearer for engineering discipline: CI/CD best practices, QMS frameworks, and operational excellence
- Drive a culture of transparency and continuous improvement through rigorous RCA processes, incident reviews, and blameless post-mortems
Skills & qualities we value:
- Proven track record leading both quality engineering and developer experience teams at scale
- Deep expertise in modern test automation strategies, frameworks (e.g. Selenium, Playwright, Cypress), and QA tooling (e.g. TestRail, Allure)
- Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS preferred), Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code principles
- Experience defining quality metrics, defect lifecycle management, and driving data-informed QA process improvements
- Demonstrated ability to operate as a horizontal enablement function — influencing without direct authority across multiple product teams
- Excellent communication skills; able to translate between technical detail and executive narrative
- Familiarity with agile software development environments and tools like Jira and Confluence
Perks & benefits you will love:
Spotnana strives to offer fair, industry-competitive, and equitable compensation. Our approach assesses total compensation, including cash, annual performance bonus, company equity, and comprehensive benefits.
The base salary range for this role is $220,000 - $280,000 per year, depending on a number of factors including the candidate’s working location.
We care for the people who make everything possible - our benefits include:
- Pre-tax and ROTH 401(k) options via Fidelity with up to a 4% company match
- Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability effective on your hire date. We cover 100% of your employee premiums and 85% of your eligible dependents
- Pre-tax flexible spending account options for health, dependent care and commuter expenses
- Flexible PTO in addition to 10 company holidays and an end-of-year company shutdown
- Up to 26 weeks of parental leave
- Monthly cell phone/internet stipend
- Extra perks — IATAN travel membership, pet insurance, financial wellness tools, Calm app access, and more