Manager, IT QA

Guild Mortgage Company, closing loans and opening doors since 1960. As a mortgage banking firm we are dedicated to serving the home owner/buyer. Our goal is to provide affordable home financing for our customers, utilizing the best terms available while providing a level of professionalism and service unsurpassed in the lending industry.

Position Summary

The Manager, IT Quality Assurance is a people leadership role accountable for ensuring QA people, practices, automation, operating models, and stakeholder partnerships collectively support quality outcomes, delivery confidence, customer experience, and business results across assigned products, teams, or functional domains.

The QA Manager leads through people, process, data, and influence. This role is responsible for building team capability, setting clear expectations, improving quality practices, driving automation adoption, strengthening cross-functional relationships, and ensuring QA operates as a trusted partner in the software delivery lifecycle.

The QA Manager is expected to create clarity, remove obstacles, develop talent, scale quality practices, and ensure quality outcomes are delivered consistently through people, processes, systems, and measurable improvement.

Compensation

This role is an exempt position with a Targeted Salary Range of $124,139 to $181,553 annually.

Compensation at Guild is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to local and federal minimum wage requirements, education, level of experience, and applicant's geographical location.

Essential Functions

• People Leadership & Talent Development

• Provide direct people leadership for QA professionals, including performance management, coaching, development, feedback, and accountability.

• Set clear expectations for quality, execution, ownership, communication, professional standards, and delivery partnership.

• Assign work, establish priorities, and manage team capacity to support predictable delivery and business outcomes.

• Coach team members to strengthen testing capability, technical judgment, automation understanding, leadership skills, and professional effectiveness.

• Address performance gaps directly, clearly, and consistently using evidence, role expectations, and outcome-based feedback.

• Identify high-potential employees and create opportunities for expanded responsibility, leadership exposure, and career growth.

• Build succession plans, bench strength, and long-term capability for critical QA roles.

• Forecast staffing, capacity, and skill needs across assigned products, teams, or domains and recommend hiring, development, contractor, or resource planning actions.

• Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, continuous improvement, learning, and customer-focused execution.

• Quality Outcomes & Portfolio Ownership

• Own quality outcomes across assigned products, teams, initiatives, or functional domains.

• Ensure teams apply disciplined planning, execution, risk management, defect management, release readiness, and quality practices.

• Hold teams accountable for execution quality, test coverage, delivery commitments, risk visibility, and customer outcomes.

• Balance quality, speed, risk, capacity, staffing, and business priorities across the portfolio.

• Make informed release readiness recommendations based on objective evidence, quality indicators, business impact, customer risk, and production stability.

• Identify, mitigate, and escalate risks that may impact customers, business operations, delivery confidence, or production outcomes.

• Ensure QA priorities and activities align to measurable business, product, delivery, and customer outcomes.

• Participate in workforce, capacity, staffing, and resource planning decisions to align organizational investment with business priorities.

• Automation & Quality Engineering Capability

• Own adoption and execution of the QA automation strategy across assigned teams.

• Drive automation as a scalable organizational capability that improves quality, delivery confidence, speed, risk reduction, and operational efficiency.

• Establish expectations for automation coverage, reliability, maintainability, delivery integration, ownership, and measurable value.

• Ensure automation investments are aligned to business risk, product priorities, customer impact, and long-term quality outcomes.

• Evaluate automation strategy, coverage, effectiveness, maintainability, and return on investment.

• Hold teams accountable for automation outcomes without requiring the manager to personally write or maintain automation code.

• Monitor automation effectiveness through metrics, feedback loops, and delivery outcomes, adjusting direction when needed.

• Reinforce automation as a core component of the QA operating model and long-term quality strategy

• Quality Governance & Organizational Capability

• Establish, enforce, and continuously improve QA standards, governance, operating models, delivery expectations, and quality practices.

• Ensure adherence to QA Definition of Ready (DOR), Definition of Done (DOD), Minimum Bar standards, and quality governance expectations.

• Create organizational clarity by defining ownership models, execution expectations, quality standards, and decision-making practices.

• Build repeatable systems, frameworks, and practices that improve consistency, reduce dependency on individual contributors, and scale QA effectiveness.

• Identify systemic barriers, organizational inefficiencies, tooling gaps, and capability gaps impacting QA effectiveness.

• Use metrics, trends, quality indicators, and feedback loops to identify patterns, risks, root causes, and improvement opportunities.

• Lead durable improvements that strengthen QA maturity, delivery confidence, customer outcomes, and organizational performance beyond a single project or issue.

• Stakeholder Leadership & Business Partnership

• Serve as the primary QA leader for Development, Product, and Business stakeholders across assigned areas.

• Build trust-based relationships by providing clear expectations, credible QA leadership, consistent follow-through, and business-aware decision-making.

• Partner with Product, Development, and Business stakeholders to improve quality throughout the software delivery lifecycle, including requirements clarity, planning effectiveness, risk identification, testability, and delivery readiness.

• Align priorities, ownership, risk tolerance, readiness expectations, and decision-making across teams.

• Influence quality outcomes through leadership, expertise, data, credibility, and partnership rather than positional authority alone.

• Resolve ambiguity, ownership gaps, competing priorities, and cross-team issues that impact quality or delivery outcomes.

• Lead adoption of new practices, operating models, tools, and organizational changes across QA and delivery teams, creating clarity, addressing barriers, and ensuring new expectations are understood, adopted, and sustained.

• Communicate status, risks, quality indicators, customer impact, and readiness decisions clearly, proactively, and in language appropriate for the audience.

• Establish QA as a credible, trusted, and strategic partner in delivering meaningful solutions for QA teams, delivery partners, business stakeholders, and customers.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field required.
• Minimum six years of experience in QA role(s) and at least two of those years spent in a manager level role(s) required.
• Minimum two years of supervisory experience preferred.
• Demonstrated experience leading QA professionals and achieving results through teams.
• Demonstrated experience leading testing efforts across complex initiatives, portfolios, or delivery areas.
• Strong understanding of enterprise testing practices, automation strategies, operating models, delivery frameworks, and quality governance.
• Demonstrated experience leading teams that use test automation and integrating automation into delivery practices.
• Experience evaluating automation effectiveness, establishing automation expectations, and holding teams accountable for automation outcomes.
• Experience with backend, API, data validation, or Microsoft SQL Server testing practices preferred.
• Leadership Experience
• Proven success providing people leadership, coaching, mentorship, talent development, and accountability.
• Demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders, decisions, and organizational outcomes.
• Demonstrated ability to drive results through others rather than direct individual contribution.
• Demonstrated ability to lead change, improve practices, and build scalable team capability.
• Skills & Competencies
• Strong leadership capability with the ability to drive performance, accountability, and results through teams.
• Ability to influence stakeholders and lead beyond direct authority.
• Strong organizational, analytical, and strategic thinking capability.
• Ability to translate business objectives into quality strategies, standards, and measurable outcomes.
• Ability to use metrics, evidence, and risk assessment to guide decisions and improvement actions.
• Ability to identify organizational gaps, build scalable solutions, and improve operating effectiveness.
• Ability to evaluate automation strategies, test coverage, automation effectiveness, maintainability, and return on investment.
• Excellent communication, relationship-building, stakeholder management, and change leadership skills.
• Ability to operate effectively at tactical, operational, and strategic levels.
• High degree of ownership, accountability, judgment, and decision-making capability.
• Authority & Scope
• Accountable for quality outcomes, delivery confidence, and organizational effectiveness across assigned products, teams, or domains.
• Accountable for direct people leadership, performance management, talent development, succession planning, and resource planning recommendations.
• Accountable for QA standards, operating models, automation strategy adoption, governance practices, and execution consistency.
• Responsible for stakeholder alignment, cross-functional partnership, organizational influence, and quality-related decision support.
• Responsible for identifying and implementing improvements that increase QA effectiveness, scalability, delivery confidence, and customer value.
• Operates with a high degree of autonomy; decisions and recommendations impact customers, business outcomes, delivery performance, team effectiveness, and stakeholder confidence.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills required.
• Highly organized and detail-oriented; ability to work in a fast-paced, metrics-driven environment required.
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite, Word, Excel, Wiki, collaborative cloud-based programs, and third-party software applications required.
• Commitment to company values.
• Customer Service - Proactive attention to each person
• Integrity - Do and say whats right
• Respect - Treat others with dignity
• Collaboration - Listen and work together
• Learning - Seek knowledge and strive for improvement
• Excellence - Deliver the unexpected

Supervision

• Job Scope: Responsible for understanding the department/functional area objectives and goals and how own job contributes to achievement of these goals; may contribute insights and ideas on policies, processes, procedures, and efficiency; may recommend changes and enhancements based on analysis and evaluation of circumstances
• Complexity: General precedents may exist for most problems; conducts independent research/analysis to identify the appropriate approach
• Impact: Decisions and actions have a major impact on the outcomes of the department, projects, and programs; Has a direct and significant impact on the business and/or operations of major segments of the organization
• Interaction/Supervision: Acts as a mentor/guide to less experienced professional contributor staff in a similar role; works independently and only under general direction; guided by professional standards, desired outcomes, and project plan specifications

Direct Reports

# Direct Reports

Job Titles of Direct Reports

up to 15

IT Quality Assurance Analyst roles

InDirect Reports

# Indirect Reports

Job Titles of Indirect Reports

multiple

Requirements

Physical: Work is primarily sedentary; mobility in an office setting.

Manual Dexterity: Ability to operate standard office equipment and keyboards.

Audio/Visual: Regularly required to accurately perceive, distinguish and interpret information received visually and through audio; e.g., words, numbers and other data broadcasted aloud/viewed on a screen, as well as print and other media.

Environmental: Office environment - moderate noise, no substantial exposure to adverse environmental conditions.

Travel: 5% or less

Mental: Learn new tasks, remember processes, maintain focus, complete tasks independently, and make timely decisions in the context of a workflow.

Schedules: Work is primarily performed during the business week, Monday - Friday

Guild offers a pleasant work environment, competitive compensation and excellent benefits package; including medical, dental, vision, life insurance, AD&D, LTD and 401(k) with employer match.

Guild Mortgage Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

REQ#: MANAG018512