QA Lead - AI Augmented

The QA Lead – QA Strategist & AI-Augmented Quality drives the overall quality strategy across the delivery lifecycle, embedding quality from requirements through production rather than limiting QA to test execution.

The role combines Quality Engineering, strategic QA governance, risk-based testing, people leadership, stakeholder management, and AI-augmented quality practices.

Acting as a Quality Strategist and Quality Assurer, the QA Lead challenges requirements, identifies risks early, defines the appropriate quality approach, and enables teams to build quality by design.

AI is leveraged to augment QA expertise, improve efficiency and coverage, accelerate analysis, and generate quality insights, while maintaining human ownership, judgement, and validation.

Key Responsibilities:

QA Strategy & Quality Engineering

• Define and drive the QA strategy aligned with business objectives, product risks, architecture, and delivery methodology.
• Establish testing approaches, quality gates, coverage objectives, environments, data, and release criteria.
• Apply Risk-Based Testing to prioritise QA efforts according to business and technical risk.
• Promote Quality Engineering, shift-left, and quality-by-design practices.
• Continuously improve QA processes, standards, frameworks, and ways of working.
• Define test scenarios and conditions based on business and technical risks.
• Ensure appropriate use of test techniques including EP, BVA, Decision Tables, State Transition, Error Guessing, Exploratory Testing, and Risk-Based Testing.
• Oversee functional, integration, regression, UAT, API, exploratory, and end-to-end testing.
• Lead defect triage and monitor quality risks, coverage, and defect trends.
• Provide objective quality information to support release readiness and Go/No-Go decisions.

Strategic Shift-Left

• Engage early in requirements, solution, and design discussions.
• Review BRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, and functional specifications from a quality perspective.
• Challenge ambiguous, incomplete, contradictory, or non-testable requirements.
• Identify functional and business risks before development.
• Promote 3 Amigos collaboration between Business, Development, and QA.
• Focus on defect prevention, not only defect detection.

AI-Driven Quality Intelligence

• Define and promote the use of AI across QA activities.
• Leverage AI in the testing activities.
• Use AI to identify quality gaps, recurring defects, abnormal patterns, and potential risks.
• Establish human validation of AI-generated outputs.
• Promote prompt engineering and AI-assisted problem solving within QA teams.
• Ensure responsible use of AI, including consideration of data privacy, limitations, accuracy, and human oversight.

• Move QA towards predictive and preventive quality using data, historical defects, production incidents, and AI-assisted analysis.
• Identify opportunities to optimise regression scope and testing priorities.
• Use AI-assisted insights to support quality dashboards and management reporting.
• Establish feedback loops between production, defects, testing, and future QA strategies.

People Leadership

• Lead, coach, mentor, and develop QA Engineers and Analysts.
• Build QA capability across testing, automation, Quality Engineering, and AI.
• Define competency expectations and development plans.
• Promote knowledge sharing and continuous learning.
• Foster a culture where QA professionals are empowered to challenge requirements and raise risks.

Stakeholder & Client Management

• Act as a senior QA contact for Business, Product, Development, Architecture, Operations, and clients.
• Communicate quality status, risks, dependencies, and release readiness.
• Translate technical quality risks into business impact.
• Facilitate quality discussions and challenge delivery decisions where necessary.
• Support governance meetings, client presentations, audits, and quality reviews.

Quality Governance

• Define and maintain QA standards, processes, templates, and best practices.
• Establish quality governance across projects and teams.
• Track and analyse quality metrics such as defect leakage, coverage, regression effectiveness, defect ageing, automation coverage, and production incidents.
• Provide quality reporting to management.
• Drive continuous improvement based on measurable quality outcomes.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Certifications in Quality Assurance, Testing, or Agile methodologies would be advantageous, such as: ISTQB Foundation/Advanced Level Certified Agile Tester (CAT) Scrum Master or Agile certifications Quality Engineering certifications
• Extensive experience in Software Testing, Quality Assurance, or Quality Engineering.
• Proven experience leading QA teams and managing complex testing initiatives.
• Experience working in Agile, Scrum, and DevOps environments.
• Exposure to AI-assisted testing tools and AI-enabled quality practices.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 791,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities.

Visit us atwww.accenture.com

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