Senior Manager, Quality Engineering (Intelligent Automation)

About the role

Cultivate a better world by leading the strategy and implementation of AI-enabled quality engineering practices across Chipotle IT. Partner with various teams to improve product quality, engineering velocity, release confidence, and operational resilience.

Responsibilities

• Drive an AI-forward quality engineering strategy, incorporating generative AI, intelligent automation, and agentic solutions to improve test design, coverage, defect detection, triage, and release confidence.
• Evaluate, pilot, and scale AI-enabled and agentic QE solutions, including autonomous or semi-autonomous workflows for test creation, maintenance, execution, monitoring, and analysis.
• Establish governance and guardrails for the responsible use of AI in quality engineering, including reliability, security, privacy, explainability, and human oversight.
• Partner with engineering, product, data, and platform teams to embed AI-forward quality practices into SDLC, CI/CD, observability, and production validation.
• Directly contribute to Chipotle’s success across our most visible customer-facing solutions both online and in-restaurant.
• Create and enhance quality insights, reporting, and dashboards that provide visibility into engineering performance, product quality, and delivery risk.
• Use systems thinking and data-driven analysis to understand the scenarios, configurations, and customer journeys that impact product quality.
• Develop future leaders on the Quality Engineering team, expand their skills, and embrace servant leadership by removing roadblocks, giving team members autonomy and ownership.
• Work with other leaders in software development, product management, cloud/infrastructure, application support, and data, insights, & analytics teams to help define solution and application performance requirements.

Requirements

• 8+ years of working experience in a senior SDET, software development, or similar role.
• 3-5 years of relevant management experience.
• Experience developing and scaling AI-forward engineering strategies within quality engineering, software engineering, or platform engineering organizations.
• Experience evaluating, implementing, or scaling fully agentic or semi-agentic solutions, including autonomous workflows, orchestration patterns, intelligent copilots, or AI-based decision support in engineering processes.
• Familiarity with LLM-powered development and testing use cases, and experience evaluating AI/ML-enabled tools and platforms that improve engineering productivity, product quality, and operational resilience.
• Strong understanding of governance, risk, and controls for enterprise AI adoption, especially regarding security, privacy, compliance, and reliability.
• Experience using production telemetry, observability, and quality signals to enable predictive or adaptive quality engineering.
• Proven track record of implementing intelligent quality engineering and automation strategies for highly complex, distributed systems.
• Strong desire to build and lead teams while creating a culture of problem-solving, ownership, and collaboration across large-scale engineering environments.
• Strong working knowledge of object-oriented analysis and design, SOLID principles, and modern software architecture patterns.
• Proficiency with cloud technologies (either AWS or Azure).
• Experience with observability solutions and platforms including, but not limited to, Splunk, DataDog, Prometheus, Grafana.
• Experience with languages such as JavaScript and/or TypeScript, C#, SQL, Powershell.
• Experience with modern test automation solutions including, but not limited to, Playwright, Cypress, wdio, Postman.
• Experience with test automation SaaS providers including, but not limited to, Saucelabs, Browserstack.
• Experience with Azure or AWS DevOps, Agile process improvement, CI/CD pipeline management and automation, NPM, or other package managers.
• Adequate communication and interpersonal skills to collaborate effectively with all business units.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Professional certifications in software development, quality assurance, or related fields.
• Experience with agile methodologies and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Knowledge of DevOps tools and technologies.

Skills

• Experience with AI/ML frameworks and tools.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent project management and organizational skills.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance plans.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan with company match.
• Sick leave and vacation time.
• Flexible work schedule.
• Professional development opportunities.
• Employee referral program.

Pay

A reasonable estimate of the current base pay range for this position is $130,000.00–$193,000.00. You are also eligible for annual cash bonuses and equity awards based upon performance and other factors. Actual compensation offered may vary depending on skill level, experience, and/or education.

Schedule

This position will be based in our Columbus, OH office 4 days per week (with work from home on Friday). Remote work is not available for this role.