Quality Engineering Architect

Quality Engineering Architect
Internal Job Title: Annuity Business Systems - Quality Assurance Practice Lead
Location: League City, TX. – Marina Plaza | Work Arrangement: Onsite/office-based
Status: Full-Time, Salaried
Reports to: VP, Life Annuity Systems
We are seeking a Quality Assurance Practice Lead to own the software quality practice across American National's agile delivery teams. The Quality Assurance Practice Lead will set the standards that define when work is ready to build and ready to release, the test architecture that spans teams, and the IT and Business coordination that carries a feature through user acceptance.
This is a senior individual-contributor role where you will inherit a working practice built on draft standards. You will not manage a testing team. You will set the standards every team works to, coach the people who apply them, and own the measurement and governance that make quality visible. The operating model is explicit: IT owns environments, defect resolution, and technical support; the Business owns acceptance scenarios, the acceptance decision, and user signoff; Business and IT share ownership of test planning, coordination, and go-live readiness.
What You’ll Do:

Partner with Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts and Scrum Masters to raise story testability, coaching Given/When/Then acceptance criteria in refinement and keep testability embedded in the Definition of Done.

Own test plan and suite architecture in Azure Test Plans, including requirement-based traceability from test case to user story.
Design, build, and maintain AI agents, prompt libraries, and AI-assisted quality engineering solutions that analyze requirements, evaluate acceptance criteria, assess testability, and generate draft test scenarios. Partner with delivery teams to continuously improve agent effectiveness while ensuring responsible AI practices, clear traceability of AI-generated content, and human review of all outputs prior to adoption.
Own and evolve the acceptance criteria standard and testability rubric and govern changes to it through an agreed review path.
Own regression and smoke suite composition as a documented, risk-based decision, including the rationale for each test in the suite.
Design test coverage for cross-team features and end-to-end business journeys that no single team owns.

Provide consultation to the UAT operating model and its RACI, and coach business acceptance testers to author their own scenarios rather than authoring on their behalf.

Own release readiness assessment and ensure every feature has a named business owner accountable for signoff.
Advise on where automated test gates belong in Azure Pipelines and what each gate asserts, sequence automation behind foundational fixes rather than ahead of them, and own gate governance: named approvers, required justification, restricted edit rights, and monthly bypass review.
Own the quality measurement plan and dashboards and report quality trends against baseline to IT and Business leadership on a predictable cadence.

Chair the Testing Community of Practice, own its standards backlog, and coach embedded testers, developers, Product Owners, Business Analysts and Scrum Masters.

Surface environment and test data constraints, and name residual risk when an adequate test environment or representative data cannot be provided.

What You’ll Bring:

8 or more years in software quality engineering, testing, or quality architecture, including at least 3 years operating above the individual team level, across multiple teams, a program, or an enterprise practice.
Demonstrated ownership of a quality standard that other teams adopted, with the ability to describe how that adoption was won.
Hands-on depth in Azure DevOps: Boards, Test Plans, and Pipelines, including requirement-based suites, configurations, shared parameters, and Work Item Query Language (WIQL) queries.
Experience coaching Given/When/Then or equivalent structured acceptance criteria with Product Owners and Scrum Masters in refinement.
Experience designing and coordinating user acceptance testing where the Business, not IT, held the acceptance decision.
Experience defining risk-based regression scope, and the judgment to defend what was deliberately excluded.
Working fluency with test automation and CI/CD quality gates sufficient to direct and review automation work.
Built AI-assisted workflows in quality or delivery workflow, with a clear articulation of where the human decision stays.
Experience shaping a cross-team operational model.
A track record of influence without formal authority, and written communication strong enough that standards are followed because they are clear.
Coaches Product Owners and Business Analysts to write acceptance criteria rather than rewriting them.

What Will Set You Apart:

Life insurance, annuity, or financial services delivery experience, particularly policy administration, new business, or distribution systems.
Experience in a regulated environment with SOX and audit obligations touching software delivery.
Experience standing up or leading a Community of Practice, and SAFe or scaled agile experience, particularly quality practices across one or more ARTs.
ISTQB certification at Advanced Level, or equivalent demonstrated depth.
Test data management and masking experience in an environment holding non-public personal information.

What This Role Is Not:

This is not a test execution role.