Chief Agentic Quality Architect

ROLE OVERVIEW 

As our client's Chief Agentic Quality Architect, you will orchestrate the transition from traditional scripted testing to an AI-augmented quality ecosystem.

Your primary goal is to leverage agentic AI tools to generate, execute, and maintain high-fidelity test suites that keep pace with a development environment where AI agents are writing a significant portion of the production code. 

WHAT YOU'LL DO 

1. Assess & Benchmark Quality Coverage 

• Take ownership of a new product or suite of products as a hands-on quality leader. Conduct a comprehensive audit of the existing test estate across all layers — unit, integration, API, UI, sanity, and regression — evaluating depth, coverage, and reliability of each suite. 
• Evaluate the current QA tooling, frameworks, and automation maturity against client's quality benchmarks and coverage expectations. Identify systemic gaps, test debt, and high-risk areas with no automated coverage. 
• Produce a Current State & Gap Coverage Report that maps existing tooling, highlights missing coverage domains, and recommends the adoption tooling needed to close the gaps — the baseline for every roadmap that follows. 

2. Define the Quality Engineering Roadmap 

• Define missing test cases and user journeys. Prioritise end-to-end automation across critical business flows using agentic automation patterns, with a deliberate emphasis on left-heavy coverage — maximising unit and integration depth first, and extending rightward through black-box UI and regression testing. 
• Architect and own the phased quality engineering roadmap, structured as three delivery horizons: 
• Two-Week Plan: Complete the current-state assessment; identify the highest-risk coverage gaps; stand up quick-win automation on the most critical user journeys; evaluate and select the tooling to be adopted. 
• One-Month Plan: Core regression coverage established across primary domains; CI/CD quality gates operational and integrated into the development pipeline; agentic test generation producing its first validated suites. 
• Three-Month Plan: End-to-end agentic automation live and self-maintaining; Client's benchmark coverage achieved; AI guardrails enforced across all automated agent output; quality metrics visible to engineering leadership. 

3. Agentic Test Generation & Automation 

• Prompt-Based Engineering: Utilise AI agents to automatically transform business requirements and manual test cases into executable Playwright or Cypress scripts. 
• Synthetic Test Creation: Implement tools that autonomously generate test data and edge-case scenarios that human testers might overlook. 
• Autonomous Maintenance: Deploy self-healing automation frameworks that use AI to detect UI changes and update test selectors without human intervention. 

4. Guardrails for AI-Generated Code 

• Agent Regression Strategy: Design and own a comprehensive regression suite specifically tuned to catch the non-deterministic “hallucinations” or logic errors common in AI-generated code. 
• Behavioral Locking: Implement characterisation testing patterns to “lock in” the expected behaviour of legacy systems during AI-assisted refactoring. 
• Autonomous Output Validation: Define quality gates to validate the outputs of autonomous agents, ensuring they meet functional, security, and performance boundaries. 

5. Build & Mentor an AI-Skilled QA Team 

• Hire QA engineers with deep, hands-on capability in AI-assisted testing and agentic automation frameworks — not generalists, but specialists who can design, implement, and operate AI-driven quality systems in production. 
• Mentor and upskill the team on agentic workflows, guardrail frameworks, and quality benchmarks. Set the technical bar and hold the team to it through code reviews, pairing, and structured coaching. 
• Instil a quality-first engineering culture where QA is embedded throughout the development lifecycle — not a downstream gate — and every AI-generated change is treated as a quality risk until validated. 

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR 

• 10+ years in QA automation engineering, SDET, or test architecture roles 
• Automation Frameworks: Expert-level proficiency in Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium. 
• AI Tooling: Hands-on experience using LLMs (Claude, GPT-4, etc.) and agentic frameworks to generate code or automate workflows. 
• CI/CD Mastery: Deep understanding of integrating quality gates into AWS-based pipelines or similar environments. 
• Architectural Mindset: Ability to design "Behavioral Snapshots" to safeguard critical business logic during rapid transformations
• Availability to work until 2 pm - 3 pm US EST

NICE TO HAVE 

• Experience in remote-first or globally distributed engineering teams 
• Background in SaaS scale-ups, legacy modernization projects, or PE-backed environments 
• Exposure to performance, load, or security testing tooling 
• Comfort operating in high-ambiguity, high-ownership environments with evolving requirements