AT&T is deploying a Director of Quality Assurance to its Dallas headquarters. Stepping into this large-scale, legacy telecommunications infrastructure is not about visionary buzzwords; it is about breaking down entrenched silos between development and QA, managing offshore vendor contracts, and resolving severe technical debt. In this executive-level engineering role, you are deployed to execute a heavy operational turnaround and force modern testing protocols into a highly rigid legacy environment.
The Reality of Enterprise Telecom
AT&T operates at a scale where software failure equates to national outages. The Dallas headquarters (Whitacre Tower) is a strictly regimented corporate environment. You will manage a distributed internal team of 50+ engineers alongside external offshore vendors. The core challenge is driving modern, automated CI/CD practices into an enterprise architecture that natively resists rapid structural change.
Core Executive Deliverables
- Test Automation Strategy: Define the enterprise-wide transition from manual to automated testing. Migrating QA at a telecom giant requires fighting legacy systems; you must justify the migration downtime and capital cost to the business before deploying new frameworks.
- Team Leadership & Scaling: Manage 50+ QA engineers, SDETs, and offshore testing vendors. A significant portion of your operational bandwidth will be spent enforcing strict SLAs and rejecting subpar vendor code.
- CI/CD Integration: Partner with DevOps to embed automated testing into deployment pipelines. Development teams prioritize velocity; your pipeline integrations must be fast, deterministic, and ruthlessly stable to avoid becoming an operational bottleneck.
- Quality Metrics Governance: Establish and monitor core KPIs (Defect Escape Rate, Test Coverage), reporting directly to the VP of Engineering.
- Performance & Load Testing: Oversee stress testing environments architected 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. This tenure must demonstrate a successful transition from waterfall to agile methodologies, proving you carry actual implementation scars over theoretical management knowledge.
- Automation Architecture: Verifiable command 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 high-value departmental budgets and negotiating ruthless offshore vendor contracts.
Compensation & Executive Perks
The base salary sets a highly competitive financial floor for the Dallas market, but total compensation relies heavily on the corporate equity structure.
- Base Salary Range: $175,000 – $220,000 USD / Year.
- Executive Equity Structure: Corporate benefits include annual performance bonuses and executive stock options. As a Director in a Fortune 15 company, your true financial leverage exists in these stock grants, requiring strict scrutiny of the vesting schedules.
- Career Growth: Executive progression pathways directly to VP of Engineering or Chief Quality Officer.
- Corporate Benefits: Premium healthcare, generous 401(k) matching, and comprehensive corporate wellness programs.
Campus Logistics & Hiring
- The Physical Presence Directive
- Location: Dallas, TX. Status: Full-Time, 100% On-Site. AT&T enforces a highly publicized, strict return-to-office (RTO) policy. As a core engineering executive, expect zero remote flexibility; you will operate from Whitacre Tower five days a week.
- Executive Relocation
- A comprehensive executive relocation package to the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area is fully supported to extract top-tier engineering leadership from outside markets.
Green Flags
- Advantage: Fortune 15 Equity Leverage: The $175k-$220k base salary is merely the floor. The true financial upside comes from executive stock options and performance bonuses, scaling your total compensation exponentially if you successfully modernize their QA infrastructure.
- Advantage: Turnkey Executive Relocation: AT&T provides a comprehensive relocation package, funding your extraction from your current market and installing you directly into their Dallas headquarters.
Red Flags
- Warning Sign: Ironclad RTO Policy: There is absolutely no remote or hybrid flexibility. You are required to be physically present at Whitacre Tower five days a week, operating within a highly traditional corporate bureaucracy.
- Warning Sign: Legacy Tech Debt & Vendor Friction: You are not joining a nimble tech startup. You will spend a significant amount of political capital fighting entrenched legacy systems, breaking down rigid operational silos, and constantly auditing offshore vendor code quality.
