Senior Product Quality Engineer
Owned quality strategy and delivery for Workday Student's cloud applications, including release leadership for the largest UX initiative of its release cycle and the REST API platform supporting 3M+ student records.
Institutional customers needed modern, predictable APIs beyond Workday Student's existing integration surface. I set scope, acceptance criteria, and API versioning with PM and Engineering, then led design and refinement for 40+ REST operations across 5 services spanning Admissions and Financial Aid. The harder problem was organizational rather than technical. API quality knowledge lived in a few heads, so I built the governance layer around it: contract testing, security and client-configuration standards, documentation, and release-readiness checklists, then trained 60+ engineers on it. That is what made the API platform scale past me.
Delivered
- Reduced post-release defects by 80% across enterprise SaaS releases, partnering with Product and Engineering on use cases impacting 50%+ of the active customer base with zero regressions.
- Managed 25% of escalated customer issues, driving root cause analysis and long-term fixes that reduced repeat incidents.
- Ran Agile ceremonies as backup Scrum Lead through this period, carrying forward the estimation and backlog practices established in the Scrum Lead role, and prioritized feature and resource decisions off Jira dashboards and sprint analytics.
- REST API platform: 40+ REST operations, 5 services, 3M+ student records, 60+ engineers trained on the resulting standards.
- Configurable Online Application redesign: release lead for the largest initiative of its release cycle. Aligned scope, risks, and launch criteria for a performance-critical UX refactor of multi-step forms and dynamic fields, delivered on schedule, preserving critical customer go-lives. Wrote 300+ lines of testware for the conversion and gap logic, established test plans, success metrics, and regression suites, and verified a live patch fix under an urgent customer blocker with full end-to-end runs. Found and resolved multiple severe bugs pre-launch and influenced design changes that reduced user friction.
