Vikas Vardhan
Quality Engineering and Release Management leader with experience in leading enterprise QA transformations, Test Centers of Excellence (TCoE), Release Governance, Defect Governance, Test Automation, and Agile Quality Engineering across Banking, Financial Services, Payments, Capital Markets and Publishing domains.
Extensive experience driving End-to-End Release Management by coordinating cross-functional teams, managing release readiness, defect triage, quality gates, risk mitigation, and ensuring predictable, high-quality software releases.
Expert in establishing Quality Engineering best practices, automation strategies, CI/CD integration, release governance frameworks, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and continuous process improvements.
Hands-on expertise in Java, Selenium WebDriver, Playwright, Python, TestNG, Maven, Jenkins, REST Assured, API Testing, SOAP UI, Appium, Cucumber, BDD, DevOps and AI-assisted Quality Engineering using GitHub Copilot, testRigor and Prompt Engineering.
Experienced in leading globally distributed teams across India, Europe, USA, Canada and Australia while collaborating with Product Management, Development, Business and Operations teams.
Experience
Associate Director
Volante Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.
Key Responsibilities
Lead End-to-End Release Management across multiple enterprise platforms.
Drive Release Governance to ensure predictable, high-quality software deliveries.
Own Defect Governance by leading defect triage meetings, prioritization and resolution tracking.
Coordinate cross-functional delivery teams across QA, Development, Product Management and Business.
Define release readiness criteria, quality gates and deployment sign-offs.
Establish Quality Engineering standards across projects.
Drive automation adoption to improve release quality and reduce manual effort.
Implement quality metrics, dashboards and release health reporting.
Utilize AI tools including GitHub Copilot and testRigor to improve engineering productivity.
Evaluate emerging AI technologies and industry best practices for continuous improvement.
Mentor QA teams on Quality Engineering practices and automation strategy.
Support strategic initiatives focused on process excellence and innovation.
Key Achievements
Improved release predictability through standardized release governance.
Strengthened defect management discipline across multiple programs.
Enhanced release readiness through standardized quality gates.
Promoted enterprise-wide Quality Engineering practices.
Increased engineering productivity through AI-assisted testing.
Senior Technical Architect
HCL Technologies
Key Responsibilities
Defined enterprise Test Strategy and Quality Engineering best practices.
Identified automation opportunities across programs.
Reduced defect leakage through Root Cause Analysis.
Developed automation Proof of Concepts using Java, Selenium and TestNG.
Guided engineering teams on automation adoption and QA maturity improvements.
Senior Test Automation Architect
US Tech Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
Key Responsibilities
Defined automation strategy and testing best practices.
Built Selenium and Java automation frameworks.
Developed API automation frameworks using REST Assured.
Integrated automation suites with Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.
Created Pipeline jobs for automated execution and reporting.
Improved regression execution efficiency and automation coverage.
Identified process gaps and implemented continuous improvements.
QA Manager / QA Lead / Senior QA Engineer
Springer Nature | Syntel | Opus | Fasttrack | BMC Software
Key Responsibilities
Established and expanded Test Centre of Excellence (TCoE).
Led enterprise QA teams across multiple business domains.
Managed test planning, estimation, execution and reporting.
Improved automation coverage up to 70%.
Reduced defect leakage through structured QA processes.
Led Root Cause Analysis initiatives.
Standardized QA processes and testing best practices.
Managed stakeholder communication and delivery governance.
Mentored QA engineers and automation teams.
Education
SIBM, SIU
Executive MBA
B.E.
IIT Kharagpur
Certified Java Programmer