Compensation & Location
Location: Torrance, CA
Pay Ranges: $52.00 - $59.00
Schedule: Full-time, long-term contract
Work Type: Hybrid; 4 days onsite; 1 day remote
📍 Must be willing to work onsite in Torrance, CA
✅ Sponsorship is available for this role
‼️ W2 ONLY — No C2C, No 3rd Parties
Position Summary
We are seeking an experienced Senior QA Lead to own and drive quality assurance delivery for a large-scale enterprise modernization program.
This is a hands-on QA leadership role, not a QA coordinator position. The QA Lead will develop the overall testing strategy, create detailed test plans and schedules, lead cross-functional testing efforts, manage defects and dependencies, and provide clear QA reporting to program leadership.
The ideal candidate brings strong Waterfall and hybrid delivery experience and has led testing across complex environments involving SaaS platforms, system integrations, downstream applications, vendors, cloud infrastructure, and legacy/mainframe systems.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the overall QA strategy, test planning, execution, defect management, and QA reporting
- Develop detailed test plans, schedules, scenarios, test cases, test-data plans, and environment-readiness plans
- Establish test entry/exit criteria and formal sign-off checkpoints
- Lead QA execution across business, IT, vendor, SaaS, integration, infrastructure, security, and legacy teams
- Manage SIT, regression, end-to-end, UAT support, production-readiness, and release-validation testing
- Maintain requirements-to-test-case-to-defect traceability
- Lead regular QA checkpoints throughout test execution
- Track test coverage, execution progress, defects, environment readiness, dependencies, risks, and decisions
- Lead defect triage and drive resolution across application, vendor, integration, and business teams
- Identify QA risks and blockers early and provide clear recommendations and escalation paths
- Manage formal Waterfall test phases, stage gates, dependencies, and sign-offs
- Define and support test automation strategies and regression automation
- Coordinate test execution through enterprise test-management tools
- Develop QA dashboards, defect metrics, progress reports, and executive-level status reporting
- Support release readiness and go/no-go decisions
- Coordinate production-validation planning and post-release quality activities
- Drive accountability across teams without requiring direct reporting authority
What This Person Will Be Working On
The QA Lead will support the VSC Modernization Program, a complex enterprise transformation involving multiple interconnected applications and technology teams.
Testing may span:
- Enterprise SaaS platforms
- System integrations and APIs
- Downstream applications
- Legacy and mainframe systems
- Batch-processing workflows
- Data migration and reconciliation
- AWS/cloud environments
- Vendor-delivered solutions
- Business and operational workflows
- Production-readiness activities
- Legacy-to-modern platform transitions
The person will serve as the central QA leader responsible for ensuring testing is properly planned, executed, measured, documented, and completed before releases move forward.
Required Skills & Experience
- Senior-level experience as a QA Lead, Test Lead, QA Manager, Test Delivery Lead, or similar role
- Experience leading QA for large enterprise modernization or transformation programs
- Strong hands-on experience creating:
- QA strategies
- Test plans
- Test schedules
- Test cases and scenarios
- Test-data plans
- Entry/exit criteria
- Defect-management processes
- Strong Waterfall testing experience
- Experience with formal test phases, stage gates, sign-offs, and release-readiness processes
- Experience working within hybrid Agile/Waterfall environments
- Strong experience with System Integration Testing (SIT)
- Regression and end-to-end testing experience
- UAT coordination/support experience
- Release and production-validation experience
- Strong defect triage and defect-management experience
- Requirements-to-testing traceability experience
- Test-management tool experience
- Experience coordinating multiple application, vendor, business, and technical teams
- Test automation strategy and automation-framework experience
- Strong project-management skills, including risks, issues, milestones, dependencies, and action tracking
- Experience producing detailed QA dashboards and executive-level status reports
- Ability to lead teams and influence without direct authority
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Preferred Skills
- SaaS implementation and testing experience
- AWS/cloud testing exposure
- Mainframe and legacy-system testing
- Batch-processing validation
- Data migration, conversion, and reconciliation testing
- API and enterprise integration testing
- Automation framework experience
- Legacy-to-modern platform modernization
- Parallel-run validation
- Automotive industry experience
- Automotive finance or financial-services experience
- Warranty or Vehicle Service Contract (VSC) systems
- Claims or contract-administration systems
- Dealer-facing application experience