Head of Quality Engineering (Remote - Work from Anywhere)

Position overview

We're looking for a Head of Quality Engineering to join our technology function, reporting directly to the CTO. At Xapo, we are building truly cross-functional teams with full ownership of design, architecture, building, testing, delivery, data, and operations, structured as Stream Aligned Teams (SATs), Platform teams and Enabling teams as per Team Topologies.

This role owns the quality framework across the entire technology function, coverage standards, gate criteria, AI-assisted test tooling, SAT enablement, and pre-release veto authority. You give engineering, apps, and web a single accountable owner for what 'quality' means and how it is measured.

This is not a traditional QA role. You will not sit in a test team checking other people's code, SAT engineers own quality in their own code (shift-left). You own the system engineers test within: the framework, the tooling, the gates, and the standards.

The role is deliberately tooling-heavy over headcount-heavy. Your budget is for tooling and AI tokens, not for building a QA team beneath you. The agentic QA pipeline is already in active PoC with positive early results; you will own scaling it to production. Your north star: fully automated quality enforcement, where releases are blocked automatically when rigorous checks fail, without needing human intervention. Target: more than 80% of release quality decisions made by automated tooling within 12 months of hire.

This is an opportunity to shape how a regulated crypto bank defines and enforces software quality, at the intersection of engineering excellence, AI-assisted tooling, and a genuinely high-stakes production environment.

Responsibilities

• Quality framework definition: own coverage standards (unit, service, integration, end-to-end), gate criteria, and the quality contribution to the function-level Definition of Done. Aligned with Head of Engineering on backend and Head of Frontend Engineering on client-side.
• Coverage baselines: define measurable coverage thresholds per service and per tribe, with trend visibility, and drive adoption across teams.
• Pre-release veto authority: hold and exercise the authority to block releases when quality gates are not met. Own the automated tooling that makes this veto self-triggering rather than dependent on a single person.
• AI-assisted test tooling: define and drive the framework for automated test generation, regression coverage, integration test tooling, and the agentic QA pipeline. You are the designer and driver; implementation is a cross-functional effort with Platform, backend, web, and mobile engineers.
• SAT enablement: produce the training, documentation, tooling, and templates that let Stream Aligned Team engineers do quality work themselves, without a separate QA function.
• Test environment strategy: partner with Head of Platform Engineering on dedicated QA environments, test data management, and integration test infrastructure.
• Quality posture reporting: own the metrics like defect escape rate, coverage trend, and quality gate pass/fail rates, with visibility to CTO and engineering leadership.