Quality Assurance Captain/Coach

About Us: Apica is a leading provider of innovative software solutions in the Observability space, designed to revolutionize how businesses gain insights into their systems and applications. We are dedicated to delivering cutting-edge products that streamline processes and enhance user experiences. Our mission is to empower organizations to thrive in the digital age through intuitive and visually compelling software. Responsibilities Collaborate with engineering, product, and operations teams to identify defects, conduct tests, and validate functionality in software products and cloud services Build, own, manage, share, and grow a comprehensive test harness across all products and services, incl. test plans, cases, scripts, data, and automation tooling Collaborate with engineering on, test data management, continuous integration, release management, error tracking, code review, and quality improvement processes Document, maintain, train, enable, and coach other team members on first principles, known good processes, documented 'best practices', etc. of quality assurance Create and maintain up-to-date testing procedures, processes, solutions, scripts, and data Drive continuous improvement of our products and processes by defining, building, and executing a mature set of QA functions and procedures Evaluate, acquire, implement, document, and maintain QA automation solutions Enable other team members with documented test automation processes Provide regular management reporting on test and QA practices and results Evaluate and sign off or reject new platform, product, and feature releases Build, document, and grow 'test-driven development' practices, data, and use cases Qualifications 5+ years of proven experience showing increasing responsibility with both hands-on Quality Assurance and leadership/ownership roles in Enterprise (B2B) software Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, deep understanding of software testing methodologies (incl. test automation approaches and solutions), and ability to work proactively and collaboratively across functions incl. technical and go-to-market teams Experience in defining, delivering, leading, and growing effective quality assurance and testing programs across the entire end-to-end software delivery lifecycle, including unit, functional, regression, acceptance, integration, security, and performance testing Experience building, testing, and/or using key components of enterprise-class Observability (O11Y) and IT Monitoring tools including log management, data analytics, metrics, traces, profiling, alerting, event management, root cause analysis Open Telemetry, telemetry pipelines, and tooling Experience using AI systems and techniques (incl. Machine Learning, Generative AI, Agentic AI) in software delivery, testing, quality assurance, and system management Experience building and/or using enterprise-class IT management products and solutions including IT Infrastructure management (ITIM), IT operations management (ITOM), Observability, IT Operations Automation (ITOA), Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps), log management, Application Performance Management (APM), synthetic transaction monitoring (STM), and/or real user monitoring (RUM) Experience delivering enterprise software and cloud services using modern software delivery and systems management techniques including Cloud Computing (esp. IaaS and SaaS), API Development, Containerization, GitHub/GitOps, Kubernetes, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure as Code, Agile Development, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Serverless Computing, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Observability, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering Experience with system and application performance testing, benchmarking, sizing Experience defining, evaluating, trialing, deploying, and managing a complete software and test harness incl. test definitions, test cases, test data, processes, and tooling Experience defining and executing QA functions/frameworks for on-premises, MSP hosted, and cloud operating environments, including Windows, Linux, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud, Google Compute Cloud, and Microsoft Azure Experience defining and executing QA functions/frameworks for multiple programming languages including Go, Python Proven success in testing and delivering enterprise-class software solutions and services Excellent communication skills and ability to work with and provide clear and actionable feedback at all levels, from highly technical engineers to senior executive leaders Optional/Desired - experience with Observability vendors and tools such as Splunk, Datadog, Chronosphere. Dynatrace, New Relic, Elasticsearch, LogicMonitor, Graylog, Grafana, Prometheus, Cribl, Mezmo Edge Delta, Optional/Desired - experience with specific software delivery tools including Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Bitbucket, LambdaTest, Harness, Slack, Puppet/RunDeck, PagerDuty, Prometheus, Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, SonarQube, and/or Jenkins