Software Quality Engineer - TS/SCI with Polygraph

Description

The company is a global technology and professional services firm serving US government, defense and intelligence agencies. It has 26,000 staff and operates in more than 50 countries.

This is a Mission Assurance and Quality Manager role at the IDIQ level, based in the program management office of a large-scale national intelligence program.

You start in Task Order 2 by setting up processes, then oversee risk reduction, process compliance and product reliability so the MVIs are met. You set quality standards, oversee verification testing and govern processes.

Responsibilities

• Design, maintain and keep improving the program's quality management approach for every task order, including the quality plan, standards and templates.
• Set clear quality criteria at each stage of the software development lifecycle, Agile/SAFe practice and DevSecOps process.
• Align quality practices with contract terms, customer standards and company policy.
• Act as the final technical authority on QA tooling and architecture.
• Define and document processes for requirements, design, coding, testing, release, defect handling and configuration management.
• Run periodic compliance checks, such as audits, walkthroughs and spot checks, across task orders to confirm teams follow agreed practices.
• Analyze findings, drive corrective actions and track non-conformances and observations to closure.
• Capture lessons learned and update processes, checklists and templates.
• Define and maintain one consistent set of quality and mission assurance metrics, including defect density and leakage, test coverage, automation rate, rework, post-deployment incidents and rollback rates.
• Consolidate quality data across task orders and report trends, hotspots and systemic issues through dashboards and narratives for the PMO, program leadership and the customer.
• Work with program management to log and track quality risks and issues in the program risk and issue register.
• Lead or support root cause analysis for major defects, outages or delivery failures, and make sure corrective and preventive actions are defined, implemented and checked for effectiveness.
• Work with the Lead Agilist, solution architect and tech leads to build quality into backlog refinement, definitions of ready and done, test strategies, and CI/CD gates such as static code analysis and security scans.
• Promote test automation and shift-left quality, and add quality checkpoints to ceremonies such as PI planning, system demos and retrospectives.
• Set acceptance criteria and review standards for key deliverables, review high-risk deliverables independently before they reach the customer, and confirm quality exit criteria at release readiness reviews.
• Be the main voice on quality in customer reviews, audits and status meetings. Present quality summaries, trends and improvement plans, and handle customer quality concerns through closure.
• Make sure teams meet program quality standards and reporting expectations, review their deliverables, and bring practices into line across task orders.
• Train new team members, Scrum teams and task leads on quality expectations, processes and tools. Coach them on test design, defect prevention and documentation, and encourage them to raise quality issues early.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree (BS/BA) or equivalent experience.
• Current TS/SCI clearance with polygraph.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering and quality assurance experience, moving from hands-on contributor to senior leadership.
• 5+ years leading teams, planning, organizing and delivering major strategic initiatives.
• Proven experience designing and running a large manual-to-automation transformation, with the ability to discuss in depth the technical framework, ROI analysis and change management approach.
• Deep hands-on skill with modern automation tools, CI/CD pipeline integration, and testing large multi-tier, service-oriented architectures.
• 5+ years of related experience in continual improvement, IT quality assurance, process compliance and process improvement.
• US citizenship required.
• No certifications required.
• Desired: experience evaluating and applying GenAI tools to speed up test script generation, manage test data (including synthetic PHI/PII data) and improve QA efficiency.
• Desired: familiarity with modern automation frameworks such as Playwright and Cypress, and with shift-left API testing.
• Desired: experience with traditional enterprise stacks, including Java, Jira, GitHub and DB2 or similar, on large-scale applications.
• Desired: deep knowledge of DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate) and of setting engineering benchmarks.

Conditions

Onsite in Chantilly, Virginia, with 40 scheduled hours per week. No travel required.

The likely salary range is $162,037 to $219,227. This is not a guarantee. Pay depends on experience, location and possibly contract terms, and may fall outside this range.

Hiring includes an identity verification process using biometrics and AI. You must be on camera for virtual interviews, your photo may be taken, and you authorize use of your biometric data for verification and security.

The company is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.

Benefits

• Medical plans, some with Health Savings Accounts, plus dental and vision plans for US-based employees.
• 401(k) with company match, allowing pre-tax and post-tax contributions up to IRS annual limits.
• Full flex work weeks where possible.
• Paid time off including vacation, sick and personal time, holidays, paid parental leave, military leave, bereavement and jury duty leave.
• Short and long-term disability, life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness, and business travel and accident insurance, provided or available.