Quality Engineering Leadership / Austin, TX
I build quality organizations that ship fast without breaking things.
17+ years leading QA and quality engineering teams across B2B SaaS, cloud identity, and enterprise platforms. I scale the org, architect the automation, and prove it with metrics leadership actually reads.
Currently
Open to Director / Senior Manager Quality Engineering roles. Remote preferred, Austin-based.
573M+
Page views in a single day
Black Friday peak, Bazaarvoice
Zero
Sev-1 incidents at peak
99.99% uptime
20
Engineers led
distributed across Austin, Ukraine, India
70%+
Automated regression coverage
from a manual-heavy org, in under 18 months
01 / What I do
Three things, done well.
01
Build and scale the org.
Grew teams from single-digit to 20+ across three continents. Hired SDETs, ran career development, promoted three engineers to senior/lead inside 18 months. Team building is the part that compounds.
02
Architect code-first automation.
Playwright, TypeScript, NodeJS, WebdriverIO. I've replaced brittle legacy suites with frameworks engineers actually want to use, wired into CI/CD as real quality gates rather than advisory dashboards.
03
Make quality legible to leadership.
Release-readiness criteria, defect-escape rates, coverage and flake trends, observability-backed go/no-go calls. Executives don't read detailed reports — three metrics, red/yellow/green.
02 / Selected work
Four problems worth writing down.
Bazaarvoice / Peak Retail
Black Friday at 573 million page views
Case 01
Context
Bazaarvoice powered the ratings and reviews behind the world's largest shopper network. On Black Friday the platform faced 573M+ page views and 160M+ unique shoppers in a single day, with every major retail client watching.
Approach
Led disaster-recovery and peak-load testing across the platform — capacity modeling, latency thresholds, error-behavior validation, and operational response drills — instrumented end to end with Datadog observability. Coordinated a live readiness chain from the engineering floor up to the CEO and support organization.
- Page views
- 573M+
- Sev-1 incidents
- Zero
- Uptime
- 99.99%
What I learned
Observability beats monitoring. Real-time metrics let us catch and correct two failure paths during the event, not in the postmortem.
Ping Identity / 2021–2025
Replacing a legacy suite with a framework engineers wanted to use
Case 02
Context
Ping's cloud identity platform was tested by a fragmented, flaky legacy Selenium and Java estate. CI was slow, failures were untrusted, and teams had started routing around the pipeline entirely.
Approach
Designed and drove a code-first Playwright / NodeJS / TypeScript framework for UI and API testing across AWS-hosted microservices, piloted on two product lines. Consolidated the fragmented Java suites into one maintainable architecture and added real CI/CD quality gates — automated regression, contract testing, and environment-health checks.
- Faster test runs
- 50%
- Flake reduction
- 70%
- Defect escapes blocked pre-prod
- 40%+
- YoY maintenance cut
- ~25%
What I learned
TypeScript over JavaScript for enterprise test code, every time. Type safety catches in the editor what would otherwise fail at 2am.
Bazaarvoice / Org Transformation
From manual-heavy to 70% automated in under 18 months
Case 03
Context
A globally distributed QE org across Austin, Belfast, and Bangalore, running manual-heavy, with quality siloed away from development and no shared automation strategy — while the platform scaled toward peak retail traffic.
Approach
Built new automation frameworks and embedded QE leads into every product squad through a QA Advocacy program, mentoring developers on Golang scripting and cloud-native testing. Secured VP-Engineering sponsorship before launch. Layered in engineering-operations practice: release management, environment strategy, incident postmortems.
- Automated regression coverage
- 70%+
- Production defect reduction
- ~30%
- MTTR reduction
- ~40%
What I learned
Cultural change needs executive sponsorship first. Getting VP-Eng buy-in before we launched is the only reason it held after the initial enthusiasm wore off.
Ping Identity / Team Building
Scaling a 12-person team to 20 across three time zones
Case 04
Context
Inherited a 12-person local quality team that needed to grow — and to grow offshore — without losing the coherence that made it work.
Approach
Recruited and onboarded SDETs across Austin, Ukraine, and India, running the team as 8 direct reports plus 12 contractors. Built the onboarding path, coached the team onto Playwright and NodeJS, and established release-readiness criteria that were adopted across three-plus cloud platform product lines.
- Engineers
- 20
- Continents
- 3
- Fewer cross-team handoff delays
- ~30%
What I learned
Time-zone overlap is not a nice-to-have. Four hours of real overlap is the floor — below that you are running two teams, not one.
03 / Track record
Where the work happened.
Mar 2021 – Aug 2025
Senior Software Quality Engineering Manager, Ping Identity
Cloud identity platform. 20-person distributed QE org; code-first Playwright automation; Kubernetes-native testing on AWS.
Jul 2020 – Mar 2021
Senior Manager, Quality Assurance, SunPower Corporation
Software quality assurance leadership.
Aug 2019 – Apr 2020
Director of Engineering Operations & Quality, Bazaarvoice
Global QE org across Austin, Belfast, Bangalore. Release-readiness KPIs and engineering-ops practice.
Jun 2018 – Aug 2019
Director of Quality Assurance, Bazaarvoice
DR and scalability testing for the world's largest shopper network. QA Advocates embedded across R&D.
Jun 2016 – Jun 2018
Senior Manager, Quality Assurance, Bazaarvoice
CI/CD integration, Java and NodeJS automation, product quality KPIs.
Sep 2014 – Jun 2016
Manager, Quality Assurance, Bazaarvoice
Quality standards and test strategy across matrixed Agile teams.
Oct 2013 – Sep 2014
DMV QA Manager, 3M MVSS
3 QA supervisors and 30+ engineers; hardware/software integration test automation.
Nov 2012 – Jul 2013
QA Manager, Spredfast
CI environment optimization and automated testing lifecycle.
Earlier: Hewlett-Packard, 3M Health Information Systems, Dell. Full history on LinkedIn.
04 / Currently building
Still shipping.
I don't think quality leaders who can't read code can make good technical decisions — or earn their team's respect. So I keep building.
CM2 DigitalFounder
AI-powered SaaS products, from content generation to image analysis. Shipping real products end to end: product decisions, build, deploy, and the customers who complain when it breaks.
AI-assisted testing
An active proof-of-concept putting LLMs into test workflows: test generation and intelligent test selection, aimed at coverage velocity that doesn't require headcount. Also working with RAG, embeddings, and MCP servers for quality engineering applications.
Daily practice
Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, and Lovable in regular use. This site included.
06 / Credentials
Education and certification.
Education
B.S. Computer Science
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, 2002
Certifications
- Certified Quality Improvement Associate (CQIA), ASQ
- Certified Software Testing Professional (CSTP), QAI Global Institute
- Six Sigma Green Belt
Affiliations
American Society for Quality (ASQ) · Agile Austin