Senior Manager Quality Engineering

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.

Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.

***Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time, including CPT/OPT.***

The Senior Manager, Quality Engineering - API & Data Platforms will oversee a team responsible for quality assurance, testing, automation, metrics, reporting, and defect reduction across enterprise projects, with a focus on API, integration, and data platforms. This role will provide hands-on leadership across quality standards, processes, test strategy, automation, performance testing, and release readiness while partnering with cross-functional teams to strengthen quality practices across complex systems and applications.

What you will do:

• Lead and mentor a team of Quality Engineers and Business Systems Analysts, including an offshore QA team, on quality engineering best practices across manual and automated testing.
• Provide hands-on leadership across quality management standards, processes, test planning, test cases, bug tracking, automation, performance testing, metrics, and reporting.
• Develop and coordinate test strategies, plans, reporting, and quality activities for software projects and applications.
• Lead quality assurance efforts for API, integration, and data-focused applications involving multiple upstream and downstream systems.
• Drive scalable automation approaches for functional, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing, including reusable automation frameworks for APIs and data-driven applications.
• Validate data integrity, transformation logic, reconciliation, and consistency across enterprise applications, distributed systems, and relational and NoSQL databases.
• Support testing of event-driven workflows and streaming architectures, including message validation, event sequencing, downstream processing, and error handling.
• Collaborate with development, project management, business, management, DevOps, Product, Architecture, and platform engineering teams to align quality activities with delivery needs.
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and support continuous testing practices within Agile and DevOps environments.
• Provide visibility into product quality during development and before major releases through metrics, reporting, monitoring, risk assessment, and release readiness activities.
• Improve standards, best practices, and processes related to test plans, test cases, automation, quality metrics, and domestic and global QA practices.
• Support performance, scalability, reliability, and production validation testing for enterprise applications and platforms.
• Identify quality and delivery risks and recommend mitigation approaches to reduce project delays and defects.
• Evaluate and apply new technologies, testing tools, automation approaches, and AI-assisted testing solutions where appropriate to improve quality engineering practices.
• Perform managerial responsibilities, including performance reviews, time-off approvals, performance management, hiring and termination decisions, training, coaching, mentoring, and directing the work of direct reports.

What you will bring:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent job experience.

Six years of testing experience.

• Hands-on experience with quality engineering, software testing, test automation, test strategy, planning, reporting, and coordination.
• Experience leading, coaching, mentoring, and motivating QA or Quality Engineering teams.
• Strong automation engineering skills and the ability to understand, review, and contribute to integration and automation code.
• Experience testing API-centric, integration-heavy, and data-intensive applications.
• Experience validating complex data flows across distributed systems and databases.
• Experience working with automation frameworks and API testing tools such as Karate, Cucumber, JUnit, TestNG, REST Assured, or similar frameworks.
• Experience working with CI/CD tools and automated execution pipelines such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar platforms.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, problem-solving, issue resolution, negotiation, and diplomacy skills.
• Proven ability to prioritize, organize, deliver on commitments, and maintain strong attention to detail.
• Ability to identify risks and recommend mitigations for project delays and quality concerns.
• Client or customer management experience and the ability to collaborate effectively with teams across the enterprise.
• Ability to engage with and learn new technologies.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.

What will set you apart:

• Agile experience working with engineering teams.
• Experience with AWS cloud environments and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience with Kafka and event-driven microservices architectures.
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, SQL Server, DynamoDB, and complex enterprise data validation.
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and containerized testing environments.
• Experience with performance and load testing tools such as Gatling, JMeter, or LoadRunner.
• Exposure to observability, monitoring, and logging platforms.
• Experience with AI-assisted testing, intelligent automation, or other modern quality engineering practices.
• Knowledge of enterprise integration patterns and distributed system architectures.

This job operates in a professional office environment.

This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job. The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time. You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description. You may be required to perform other duties that are not included on this job description. The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason, as per terms and conditions of your employment contract.