Director, Quality Engineering & Developer Experience

Let’s Build What’s Next, Together. We are Spotnana. We’re on a mission to modernize the infrastructure of the $1.6 trillion travel industry to power the perfect trip for travelers everywhere. Our Travel-as-a-Service platform is designed to make every trip better, whether someone is booking for work or leisure travel, building a travel tool, or looking to offer personalized experiences at scale.

Let’s Build What’s Next, Together. We are Spotnana. We’re on a mission to modernize the infrastructure of the $1.6 trillion travel industry to power the perfect trip for travelers everywhere. Our Travel-as-a-Service platform is designed to make every trip better, whether someone is booking for work or leisure travel, building a travel tool, or looking to offer personalized experiences at scale. We’re not just modernizing tech, we’re rethinking how the industry works. And to get there, we’re bringing together innovative, ambitious, and open-minded people who want to build something that lasts. At Spotnana, our values and principles guide how we work and grow together:

• Build the future – We are leaders, we are innovators, we are ambitious.
• Commit to excellence – We’re accountable, we are partners, we are agile.
• Stronger together – We lead with respect and integrity, we are inclusive, we are lifelong learners.

Who: You! And the rest of the Engineering department, Platform team, & their cross-functional partners. What: A Director of Platform Engineering & Quality position with outstanding leadership and influence. When: ASAP! We are looking to hire and onboard a new hire as soon as we find the right person for the job. Exciting work awaits! Where: Our office hub location of Palo Alto, CA – you will be required to be in office 1+ days per week in alignment with our office work policy. Why: We're looking for a leader to elevate engineering quality and platform reliability as Spotnana continues to scale. This role will shape the strategy, processes, and teams responsible for enabling high-quality product delivery while building a resilient platform foundation that supports every engineering team across the company. How (to land the job!): Our interview process includes an initial call with the recruiter and five conversations with direct team members and cross-functional partners focused on technical depth and leadership.

The Day-to-day Quality Engineering

• Lead and grow a world‑class functional QA team, establishing and continuously improving testing practices across the organization
• Own defect prevention end‑to‑end — from PRD ingestion to production release — ensuring new features ship with high confidence
• Partner closely with product and engineering teams to translate complex product requirements into comprehensive, risk‑based test plans with full feature coverage
• Drive the adoption of internal automation tooling and TestRail to scale QA coverage without scaling headcount linearly
• Define and track quality metrics — defect containment, escape, and rejection rates — using data to continuously raise the bar
• Champion a shift‑left testing culture, embedding quality early in the development lifecycle rather than as a gate at the end

Platform Engineering

• Own and evolve Spotnana's shared platform infrastructure — including Temporal, Cassandra, Kafka, RDS, and adjacent services — that all product pods depend on
• Build and lead a platform team that operates as a core horizontal function, enabling every product pod to focus on feature development without worrying about platform reliability, scalability, or maintenance
• Define SLOs and reliability standards for shared platform components and drive continuous improvement against them
• Partner with infrastructure, DevOps, and product engineering leads to architect the right operating model for platform ownership across the org
• Serve as a technical thought leader and escalation point for platform incidents and architecture decisions

Leadership & Cross-Functional Impact

• Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent across both QA and platform functions
• Manage vendor relationships and tooling contracts relevant to your domain
• Serve as a standard‑bearer for engineering discipline: CI/CD best practices, QMS frameworks, and operational excellence
• Drive a culture of transparency and continuous improvement through rigorous RCA processes, incident reviews, and blameless post‑mortems

Skills & Qualities We Value

• Proven track record leading both quality engineering and platform/infrastructure teams at scale
• Deep expertise in modern test automation strategies, frameworks (e.g. Selenium, Playwright, Cypress), and QA tooling (e.g. TestRail, Allure)
• Hands‑on experience with distributed systems and the shared infrastructure components that underpin large‑scale SaaS platforms — including workflow orchestration (Temporal), messaging (Kafka), and databases (Cassandra, PostgreSQL/RDS)
• Strong command of cloud platforms (AWS preferred), Kubernetes, and infrastructure‑as‑code principles
• Experience defining quality metrics, defect lifecycle management, and driving data‑informed QA process improvements
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a horizontal enablement function — influencing without direct authority across multiple product teams
• Excellent communication skills; able to translate between technical detail and executive narrative
• Familiarity with agile software development environments and tools like Jira and Confluence

Perks & Benefits You Will Love Spotnana strides to offer fair, industry‑competitive, and equitable compensation. Our approach assesses total compensation, including cash, annual performance bonus, company equity, and comprehensive benefits. The base salary range for this role is $210,000 - $280,000 per year, depending on a number of factors including the candidate’s working location. We care for the people who make everything possible - our benefits include:

• Pre‑tax and ROTH 401(k) options via Fidelity with up to a 4% company match
• Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability effective on your hire date. We cover 100% of your employee premiums and 85% of your eligible dependents
• Pre‑tax flexible spending account options for health, dependent care and commuter expenses
• Flexible PTO in addition to 10 company holidays and an end‑of‑year company shutdown
• Up to 26 weeks of parental leave
• Monthly cell phone/internet stipend
• Extra perks — IATAN travel membership, pet insurance, financial wellness tools, Calm app access, and more

We are committed to fostering a diverse, inclusive environment and to encourage these values in everyone on our team. We provide an environment of mutual respect where opportunities are available without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We believe that diversity and inclusion for people from all walks of life is key to our success as a company.

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