Curator’s Executive Summary: I’ve audited this Director of Quality Assurance requisition for AT&T. Let’s drop the “visionary” buzzwords. You are stepping into a massive, legacy telecommunications infrastructure. Shifting testing “left” at this scale isn’t about vision; it’s about breaking down entrenched silos between Dev and QA, managing offshore vendor contracts, and wrestling with immense technical debt. In this executive-level engineering role, you are being hired to execute a heavy operational turnaround.
The Reality of Enterprise Telecom
AT&T operates at a scale where software failure means national outages. The Dallas headquarters (Whitacre Tower) is a highly regimented corporate environment. You will be managing a distributed internal team of 50+ engineers alongside external offshore vendors. The core challenge here is pushing modern, automated CI/CD practices into an enterprise environment that natively resists rapid change.
Core Executive Deliverables
The original description listed standard QA goals. Here is what those deliverables actually look like on the floor:
- Test Automation Strategy: Define the enterprise-wide transition from manual to automated testing. (David’s Note: Migrating from manual QA at a telecom giant means fighting legacy systems. You won’t just pick Playwright and deploy; you have to justify the migration downtime and cost to the business.)
- Team Leadership & Scaling: Manage 50+ QA engineers, SDETs, and offshore testing vendors. (David’s Note: Managing offshore vendors is often the hardest part of this bullet. Expect to spend a significant portion of your week enforcing SLAs and rejecting subpar vendor code.)
- CI/CD Integration: Partner with DevOps to embed automated testing into deployment pipelines. (David’s Note: Devs want to ship fast; you are the roadblock if your automated tests are flaky. Your pipeline integrations must be fast, deterministic, and ruthlessly stable.)
- Quality Metrics Governance: Establish and monitor core KPIs (Defect Escape Rate, Test Coverage) directly to the VP of Engineering.
- Performance & Load Testing: Oversee stress testing environments to support millions of concurrent API calls.
Required Leadership & Technical Expertise
- Executive QA Experience: 10+ years of progressive software testing experience, with at least 5 years directing large-scale QA organizations. (David’s Note: 10 years means you’ve survived the industry transition from waterfall to agile. They want someone with implementation battle scars, not just theoretical management knowledge.)
- Automation Architecture: Verifiable understanding of modern test automation frameworks (Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, JUnit, TestNG).
- DevOps Fluency: Operational knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud-native environments (AWS/Azure).
- Strategic Budgeting: Proven track record of managing multi-million dollar budgets and negotiating offshore vendor contracts.
Compensation & Executive Perks
The $175k-$220k base is solid for the Dallas tech market, but total compensation relies heavily on the corporate bonus structure.
- Base Salary Range: $175,000 – $220,000 USD / Year
- Corporate Benefits: Competitive annual performance bonuses, executive stock options, premium healthcare, and generous 401(k) matching. (David’s Note: As a Director in a Fortune 15 company, the real financial leverage is in your stock grants. Scrutinize the vesting schedule before signing anything.)
- Career Growth: Executive progression pathways to VP of Engineering or Chief Quality Officer.
Campus Logistics & Hiring
- Work Location Policy
- This is a Full-Time position. Location: Dallas, TX. Remote status: No. (David’s Note: Take this literally. AT&T has highly publicized, strict return-to-office (RTO) mandates. As a core engineering executive, expect zero remote flexibility. You will be at Whitacre Tower 5 days a week.)
- Relocation Assistance
- A comprehensive executive relocation package to the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area is fully supported.
