Principal Manager - Quality Engineering

Job Overview Monty. Cloud is hiring a Principal Manager, Quality Engineering to own product quality for our AI-driven cloud operations platform. You will be the quality voice in release, design, and incident decisions, and give engineering leadership a clear, data-backed view of product quality. You will build and grow a QE team designed for the AI era.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will set the technical bar by working alongside the team, writing and reviewing automation code yourself.

Key Responsibilities

Own quality decisions Represent quality in release readiness, design reviews, and incident reviews, and own the release go/no-go recommendation Define and enforce quality gates across the delivery pipeline, from pull request to production Drive shift-left by influencing architecture and design decisions to improve testability and reduce quality risk Make quality visible Define and report quality metrics that give engineering leadership release confidence Check that test coverage and automation actually catch issues before they reach production Expand shift-right beyond post-release smoke and sanity tests: continuous checks on critical customer journeys, quality validation during rollouts, and turning production incidents into automated regression tests Build the QE team for the AI era Define what an SDET team looks like in the AI era: roles, skills, seniority mix, and how engineers work alongside AI agents Build and grow the QE team: hire, develop, and hold engineers to that standard Use AI to scale quality engineering Build test automation systems that scale with minimal maintenance, using AI across the QE lifecycle, from test generation to release validation Drive adoption of AI coding assistants and agents across the QE team, with clear guardrails on quality and ownership Set review standards for AI-generated tests and code Measure the impact of AI on test quality, coverage, speed, and effort Lead the test automation platform Own the direction of test automation frameworks across UI, API, SDK, CLI, MCP, and integration layers Drive API-first testing, including contract and schema validation Define test strategies for complex cloud operations workflows that span multiple clouds, customer accounts, and distributed services Partner with SRE on test environments and cloud-based execution Must Have 10-15 years in quality engineering or test automation, with 4+ years leading QE teams Track record of building or growing a QE team: defining roles, hiring, and setting the technical bar Strong hands-on programming in Python, Java, or JavaScript/TypeScript, and currently writing and reviewing automation code Hands-on experience testing applications and asynchronous, event-driven workflows built on AWS or Azure, with working knowledge of core AWS services and containers (ECS, EKS), and experience building cloud-native applications Hands-on experience with modern test automation frameworks (Playwright, Pytest, or equivalent), including designing frameworks for low maintenance at scale Hands-on use of AI across the QE lifecycle, built and used in a team's daily work, not proofs of concept, with standards for reviewing AI-generated code Strong expertise in API testing and contract or schema validation across APIs, SDK, CLI, and MCP Experience designing CI/CD quality gates (AWS Code.

Build and Code. Pipeline preferred, or equivalent) Good to Have Quality engineering for agentic systems: end-to-end testing of agent workflows, tool calls, and outputs, including non-deterministic behavior and regression across releases Performance and scale testing for a multi-tenant SaaS platform, covering APIs and cloud operations workflows Working knowledge of observability tools (Datadog or similar) Exposure to security testing and compliance standards (OWASP, SOC 2, or similar) Leadership & Soft Skills Top-notch written and verbal communication, from engineering teams to executive leadership, including quality reports that are short, specific, and honest about risk Owns release quality decisions, holds a clear position on quality and defends it with data in front of senior engineering and product leaders Influences engineering and product teams without relying on direct authority Thrives in a fast-paced, high-ownership environment Education Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field