Quality Assurance Manager Job Description

Key skills

Responsibilities

• • Maintain the quality management system and keep documentation current and controlled
• • Plan and run the internal audit schedule and drive findings to genuine closure
• • Lead root cause investigations into defects, complaints, and process failures
• • Own the corrective and preventive action process and verify that fixes held
• • Define inspection plans, sampling levels, and acceptance criteria with operations
• • Manage nonconforming material, including containment and disposition decisions
• • Assess supplier quality, run incoming inspection, and escalate persistent supplier defects
• • Report quality performance and trends to leadership and prepare for external audits

Requirements

• • Five or more years in a quality role with at least two managing a quality system or team
• • Hands-on experience maintaining a recognized quality standard in a live operation
• • Demonstrated root cause investigations that changed a process, not just a batch
• • Experience hosting or supporting an external certification or customer audit
• • Confidence holding a quality decision under production or commercial pressure
• • Ability to write clear procedures that the people doing the work will actually follow

Nice to have

• • Lead auditor certification for the relevant standard
• • Six Sigma, lean, or statistical process control training applied in practice
• • Experience in a regulated sector with its specific quality expectations
• • Background implementing a quality system from scratch rather than inheriting one
• • Experience running supplier audits at a supplier site

What separates a strong Quality Assurance Manager

Ask for one problem they solved permanently. A weak answer stops at the containment: material quarantined, customer credited, batch rejected. A strong answer continues into what the investigation found, what changed in the procedure or the tooling, how they confirmed the change worked months later, and what stopped the same failure mode appearing elsewhere. Also test their relationship with production. Quality managers who describe operations as the enemy tend to build systems people work around, while the effective ones get line supervisors raising problems voluntarily because doing so no longer feels like an accusation.

Where to source Quality Assurance Managers

Manufacturers, food producers, and regulated goods businesses train quality professionals to a documented standard and are the primary pool. Certification bodies and audit firms employ people with unusually broad exposure across many operations, though they may need to prove they can run a system daily rather than assess one. Quality engineers and senior inspectors internally are often the strongest option, since they already know the product and the failure modes. Standards bodies, auditor training cohorts, and sector quality forums are practical sourcing channels.

A useful exercise for the quality interview

Describe a genuine recurring defect from your own operation, give them the basic facts, and ask how they would investigate it and what they would want to see first. Listen for whether they ask about data before proposing a cause, whether they consider measurement and calibration as a possible source, and whether they separate containment from correction. Then ask what they would do if production insisted on shipping the affected batch to hit a delivery date. How they describe escalating that tells you whether they will hold the line in your business.

Red flags when hiring a Quality Assurance Manager

Be wary of candidates whose experience is entirely paperwork, maintaining documents for an audit without ever changing what happens on the floor. Someone who cannot describe an unpopular decision they held is unlikely to hold one for you. Watch for reliance on inspection as the primary control, since inspecting quality in after the fact is expensive and unreliable. Vagueness about how they verified a corrective action actually worked is a common weakness. Treat any suggestion of adjusting records to satisfy an audit as an immediate stop.

How an ATS supports a quality leadership hire

Quality managers are usually assessed by operations, engineering, and sometimes a customer-facing leader, and each cares about a different failure. Pitch N Hire lets you build one scorecard covering system ownership, investigation rigor, standards knowledge, and the ability to hold a decision, so those views can be compared directly. Issuing the same defect scenario to every finalist through the pipeline gives you a like-for-like read on analytical approach. Because certification and audit experience often need verifying, keeping credentials and reference notes on the candidate record keeps the evidence in one place at offer time.