Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Manager

We're looking for an SQA Manager to build Pickle's software quality function from the ground up and own the end-to-end quality lifecycle for our robotic truck unloaders — from test strategy and standards during development, through validation in simulation and hardware-in-the-loop environments, to release readiness in customer facilities.

The role blends technical and people leadership. You'll hire and mentor an SQA team, establish scalable processes and automation, define the metrics that tell us whether software is ready to ship, and partner with software, firmware, systems, hardware, product, and deployment teams to build quality in from the start. Your work will directly determine the reliability and scalability of our growing fleet.

It's a strong fit for someone who likes building structure where none exists, moves comfortably between strategy and hands-on debugging, and enjoys the messiness of hardware and software meeting the real world.  

What You'll Do

• Own Pickle's SQA strategy across software, firmware, robotics, simulation, and hardware-integrated systems.
• Hire, lead, and mentor an SQA team, setting clear goals, priorities, and development plans.
• Establish QA processes, standards, and documentation that scale across development, integration, release, and deployment.
• Define test strategies spanning unit, integration, system, regression, exploratory, and end-to-end testing, and oversee validation of robotic workflows across perception, planning, and controls.
• Expand test automation and CI pipelines to cover regression testing in HIL, simulation, and virtualized environments, and improve the tooling used to validate robots at scale.
• Set quality gates and release criteria that determine when software is ready for physical robots and customer sites.
• Own defect management end-to-end — triage, prioritization, root-cause analysis, and verification of fixes — including issues surfaced in test labs and customer deployments, using logs, telemetry, and system data.
• Build quality metrics and dashboards covering test coverage, defect trends, system reliability, and release quality.
• Help teams make informed tradeoffs between speed and risk, and stay close enough to the technology to unblock the team and contribute to critical testing efforts yourself.

What You'll Bring

• 7+ years in software QA, test engineering, or related engineering roles, including leading or managing QA teams.
• A track record of building quality strategies, processes, and metrics for complex systems.
• Strong test automation background — scripting, test frameworks, and CI/CD; Python and/or Bash preferred.
• Hands-on experience with Git, Docker, Jenkins or GitHub Actions, and hardware-in-the-loop test environments.
• Experience designing and executing testing across simulation, virtualized, and physical hardware environments.
• Comfortable in a terminal, reading logs and telemetry to debug system behavior.
• Strong leadership and communication skills: you set priorities, drive accountability, mentor engineers, and can convey quality risk to technical and non-technical audiences alike.
• Comfortable building structure in an environment where processes are still evolving.
Nice to Have
• Robotics system testing — ROS/ROS2, sensor validation, motion testing, perception, planning, or controls.
• Embedded Linux or real-time application testing.
• Supporting software or robotic systems through customer deployment and production environments.