Quality Assurance Manager

The Quality Assurance (QA) Manager supports the Operations function by ensuring service quality, operational stability, and SLA compliance across a federal enterprise platform. Reporting into the Operations organization, this role focuses on production service delivery and operational performance rather than traditional software development testing.

The QA Manager serves as a key partner to Operations leadership, providing oversight of SLA management, service quality, and performance governance across hosting/infrastructure, application development, operations, and Tier 1–Tier 3 Service Desk teams. This role ensures that incidents, outages, and service degradations are effectively measured, managed, and continuously improved in alignment with contractual and operational expectations.

This is a remote position. However, strong preference for someone local to the Falls Church area for weekly team meetings.

Responsibilities:

• Support Operations leadership in the definition, validation, tracking, and reporting of SLAs across incident response, resolution, and system performance.
• Ensure SLA measurement is driven by ServiceNow (or equivalent ITSM) data including accurate ticket lifecycle tracking.
• Maintain clear SLA calculation methodologies including business hours vs. 24x7 and outage vs. service degradation definitions.
• Provide visibility into SLA risks and support escalation of potential breaches.
• Monitor and manage production service quality across infrastructure, hosting, and application operations.
• Support release readiness, deployments, and post-implementation validation activities.
• Ensure operational processes align with system reliability, availability, and performance expectations.
• Ensure quality across Tier 1–Tier 3 support including ticket intake, categorization, prioritization, and escalation.
• Validate adherence to Help Desk SOPs including communication standards and ticket lifecycle governance.
• Drive improvements in first-touch resolution, backlog reduction, and ticket quality.
• Identify recurring incidents and support initiation and management of Problem records.
• Coordinate root cause analysis efforts across operations and engineering teams.
• Ensure corrective actions are defined, tracked, and completed.
• Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure performance aligns with service levels.
• Validate monitoring, alerting, and capacity management practices.
• Review system performance trends and operational health metrics.
• Develop and maintain SLA and operational performance reporting.
• Ensure reports are accurate, auditable, and traceable to ITSM data.
• Support governance reviews with data-driven insights.
• Ensure alignment with federal security and compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST).
• Support audit readiness, evidence collection, and continuous monitoring activities.
• Ensure secure handling of sensitive data.
• Analyze operational trends across incidents, SLAs, and performance.
• Recommend and implement improvements to processes and workflows.
• Maintain SOPs and operational documentation.
• Coordinate with development teams for production defect resolution and release readiness.
• Ensure issues are documented and prioritized based on operational impact.
• Serve as the operations-aligned quality voice to development teams.

Required Skills:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 5+ years of experience in IT Operations, Service Quality, or IT Service Management in a federal or regulated environment.
• Must have experience managing SLA's.
• Experience with ServiceNow or similar ITSM platforms.
• Experience with SLA management, incident/problem management, and reporting.
• Working knowledge of FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST 800-53, and ITIL practices.

Desired Skills:

• Experience supporting hosting, infrastructure, or cloud environments.
• Familiarity with APM tools and enterprise integrations.
• Certifications such as ITIL, Security+, or CISSP
• Strong operational mindset focused on service delivery and reliability.
• Ability to work effectively within an Operations-led environment.
• Data-driven approach to SLA performance and continuous improvement.
• Strong communication skills and attention to detail.