QA Manager

Location: Remote – India, Canada, or USA
Employment: Full-Time
Work Environment: Remote / Multi-Time-Zone Team

We are looking for an experienced QA Manager – Devices & Wearables to lead quality assurance for connected consumer devices, wearables, mobile applications, firmware, and associated cloud/software platforms.

The ideal candidate will have a strong combination of hands-on software and device testing experience, QA process ownership, Jira expertise, and team management skills. This role will work closely with product, engineering, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and external testing teams located across multiple countries and time zones.

Responsibilities

* Own the overall QA strategy, test planning, execution, defect management, and release-readiness process for connected devices and wearable products.
* Lead and manage distributed QA engineers, testers, dogfooders, and external testing partners.
* Develop and maintain detailed EVT/DVT/PVT, regression, functional, integration, field, and user-acceptance test plans.
* Coordinate testing across hardware, firmware, mobile/software applications, connectivity, and device functionality.
* Manage defects through Jira, including severity assignment, reproduction steps, logs, screenshots/videos, ownership, retesting, and closure.
* Conduct regular defect reviews and ensure P0/P1 issues have clear owners, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and measurable closure criteria.
* Work closely with firmware and software engineering teams to reproduce and troubleshoot field issues.
* Validate device functionality including:
* Cellular / LTE / VoLTE
* Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
* GPS/GNSS and location services
* Battery life and charging
* Displays, touchscreens, keypads and sensors
* Audio, microphone, speaker and wired/Bluetooth headsets
* USB and peripheral connectivity
* Firmware updates / FOTA
* Power management and device recovery
* Coordinate reliability and environmental testing with manufacturing partners and third-party laboratories.
* Compare results from internal QA teams, ODM/manufacturing partners, external laboratories, and field testers to identify inconsistencies.
* Define clear test procedures, pass/fail criteria, acceptance thresholds, and release gates.
* Prepare concise QA dashboards and management reports showing test coverage, failure rates, critical defects, trends, risks, and release status.
* Manage device allocation, tester assignments, testing schedules, and completion tracking.
* Participate in meetings with teams across North America, India, China, and other locations, requiring flexibility across multiple time zones.
* Continuously improve QA processes, documentation, automation opportunities, and release quality.

Required Qualifications

* 5+ years of QA / software testing experience, with at least 2+ years in a QA Lead or QA Manager role.
* Experience managing and mentoring QA engineers or distributed testing teams.
* Strong hands-on experience with manual software QA and end-to-end product testing.
* Strong working knowledge of Jira for defect tracking, workflow management, dashboards, and release tracking.
* Experience creating test plans, test cases, regression suites, defect reports, and release-readiness criteria.
* Experience testing physical devices, wearables, IoT products, smartphones, consumer electronics, or embedded products strongly preferred.
* Understanding of the interaction between hardware, firmware, software, mobile applications, and cloud services.
* Ability to distinguish whether a defect is likely caused by hardware, firmware, software, configuration, network, or user environment.
* Experience testing connectivity technologies such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LTE/VoLTE and GPS/GNSS.
* Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills.
* Strong written and verbal communication skills.
* Comfortable managing multiple projects, devices, test builds, and priorities simultaneously.
* Comfortable working with engineering and manufacturing teams across multiple time zones.

Preferred Qualifications

* Experience with Android-based or embedded Linux devices.
* Experience with EVT, DVT and PVT product-development stages.
* Experience working with ODM/OEM manufacturers, particularly teams in China or Asia.
* Experience with consumer electronics reliability testing, including drop, hinge, temperature, humidity, vibration, charging and battery testing.
* Familiarity with test automation frameworks is beneficial, although this is not primarily an automation role.
* Previous experience with kids devices, smartwatches, wearables, cellular devices, IoT or connected hardware products is a plus.

What We Are Looking For

We are specifically looking for someone who is not limited to managing spreadsheets and test reports. The QA Manager should be comfortable personally testing devices, reproducing difficult issues, reviewing logs, challenging questionable vendor test results, and working directly with engineering teams to determine root causes.

The successful candidate should be highly organized, technically curious, comfortable managing people, and capable of driving testing activities across hardware, firmware and software teams located in different countries and time zones.

Location Requirement: Candidate must be based in India, Canada, or the United States and be comfortable working remotely with international teams.