Quality Engineering Manager

About the role:

We're hiring a Manager II of Quality Engineering to lead a team of QEs embedded across our Agile squads. You'll report to the Senior Director of Quality Engineering and partner with peers across QE management. You own the team's careers, practice, QE tooling, and the standards they bring into their squads. Their squad's Engineering Manager coordinates their day-to-day squad work as a cross-functional peer.

Your team is distributed across multiple geographies and employment models. You're accountable for quality outcomes against a concrete target: 15% aggregate Defect Leakage Rate (DLR) for severity 0–3, with severity 0–1 held below 1%.

Depending on which squads your QEs sit in, your scope may include our payments stack, which relies on event-driven architectures along with first- and third-party APIs. Our Tooling and Automation Manager owns the SDET function and automation strategy; you and your team provide the risk and coverage signal that shapes where automation and AI tooling investment goes.

About us:

At 8am, our vision is to power a world where professionals thrive. We start every day on a mission to empower professionals with the most trusted, innovative technology to deliver world-class outcomes for their clients and exceptional financial results for their business. They count on our purpose-built solutions to simplify operations, ensure compliance, and fuel profitable growth, so they can focus on their clients and do more of the work that matters.

Founded in 2005, 8am™ (formerly AffiniPay) is the professional business platform built to help legal, accounting, and other client-focused professionals run stronger, more profitable businesses. Today, more than 250,000 professionals across the U.S. trust 8am to help them work smarter, serve clients better, and unlock their full potential. We have been recognized as one of Inc 5000’s fastest growing companies in the U.S. for 13 years in a row, and as a result, our teams continue to grow as well!

What you'll do:

• Lead a team of QEs embedded in Agile squads: hiring, coaching, performance management, and growing your ICs along our QE career ladder.
• Manage QE resource allocation across squads: rebalancing coverage as priorities shift, covering for leave or open headcount, and surfacing tradeoffs to Engineering and Product when demand exceeds capacity.
• Own the QE practice across the squads your QEs work in, enforce release readiness standards through our quality gates, and keep Qase traceability coherent.
• Review test plans authored by your team and raise the bar on coverage, clarity, and maintainability.
• Partner with peer QE managers, the Tooling and Automation team, Data Engineering, and Product to identify critical automation paths and build them into the quality gates, balancing the flows customers actually use with the flows we want customers adopting.
• Pull in our nonfunctional QE specialists (Data, Security, Performance) where their expertise sharpens coverage for the squads your QEs are in.
• Partner with Customer Support and Customer Success to bring customer signal into QE, positioning your team as customer advocates who catch failure modes before they become widespread.
• Own post-release quality: driving QE response and root cause analysis when escapes happen, and feeding those learnings back into gates, test coverage, and process.
• Enforce existing QE processes and drive continuous improvement. Contribute to Themis, our Python/PyTest/Playwright-based automation framework that implements our quality gates.

About you:

• 3+ years managing a quality-focused engineering team, with a track record of driving defect leakage or equivalent quality metrics down and sustaining them as the codebase and team grow. You understand the QE mindset: defining what good looks like, owning quality outcomes at the squad level, and partnering with Tooling and Automation to keep automation reliable and well-maintained, with zero tolerance for flakey tests.
• Strong judgment under ambiguity and proactive communication in all directions. You surface risks and quality signals early, with context and a proposed path, to your team, to Engineering Managers, to Product, and to leadership. You can present quality metrics and trade-offs clearly to senior leadership and represent the Quality Engineering team's position in cross-functional debates.
• An active view of AI in QE. We're continuously evaluating and adopting AI to accelerate QE work. You bring rigor to how AI gets used, ensure your team reviews AI output before it ships, and help them get more value from the tools over time.
• Technical breadth and depth in both QE practice and the products you'll cover. Broad enough to engage credibly with engineering peers across multiple products and verticals on test strategy, critical automation paths, and tooling decisions, and deep enough to mentor your ICs on their actual work: test design, debugging a flaky suite, decomposing a complex feature for coverage, reviewing automation critically.
• Demonstrated experience leveraging AI tools and technologies to improve workflows, enhance decision-making, or drive innovation.

Additional Information
The annual salary range for this position is $170,000 to $190,000. The salary range for performing this role outside of the US / Austin / California may differ.  8am is committed to offering competitive, fair and commensurate compensation and has provided an estimated pay range for this role. Actual compensation may vary based on job-related knowledge, skills, experience and education.

Why 8am: 

At 8am, our culture is shaped by the people who bring it to life every day. Together, we build a company rooted in continuous learning, genuine community, holistic wellness, and meaningful engagement—values that empower us as individuals and unite us as a team. Our culture is grounded in our core values: Work Smart, Win Fast; Outshine Ordinary, and We Find a Way. These values drive how we serve our customers and work with each other in a collaborative, inspiring, and empowering environment, every day.

Here’s how we support our 8Team:

• Health Insurance Coverage: We offer our 8Team a variety of medical, dental, and vision plans, designed to fit your needs, including a 100% company-paid HDHP plan for employees.
• Financial perks: We offer a competitive compensation and benefits package including annual bonuses, equity options and 401(k) or RRSP if in Canada, with a company match for all team members.
• Time for what matters: Flexible Time Off, paid holidays, and a parental leave program for our new parents.
• Wellness: Wellness stipends, mental health support, and one-on-one nutrition coaching.
• Learning and Development: Continuous learning through 8am.edu, leadership programs, professional development funds, and individually focused talent development.
• Giving back to the communities around us: Participate in our charitable matching gift program, paid time off for volunteer service, and company-sponsored volunteer events (both local and virtually).
• Engagement: Virtual and in-person team-building events, quarterly award recognition through our Rise & Shine Award of Excellence Program, and our peer-to-peer appreciation platform.

At 8am, we don’t just offer benefits - we create an environment where people can thrive, grow, and make a real impact every day.

Diversity, equity & inclusion at 8am:

At 8am, we recognize that innovation occurs with a strong team of people who are diverse in background, personality, talent and ideas. Experience comes in many forms and ensuring a diverse and inclusive workplace where we continue to learn from each other is an integral part of our culture. We are committed to creating a welcoming and transparent environment for all that embraces those differences through education, equal access to opportunities and information, inclusionary programs, and community outreach. 

Security advisory:

Our hiring teams at 8am are dedicated to recruiting top talent that share our passion for serving the professional services industry through innovative financial technology.  As such, our Talent Acquisition Team only follows legitimate hiring practices.  We will always communicate with our candidates using emails with the 8am domain and will never ask for sensitive/personal data during the application process.  All interviews take place over phone call, Zoom/Google Meet or in person.  All offers are communicated verbally by our Talent Acquisition Specialists with a written offer letter as a follow up.