Quality leadership · California

Quality
Engineering
Leader.

I’m Alicia. I own quality strategy, align teams around release risks, and mentor engineers. I stay close to the work—building automation, finding edge cases, and making accessibility part of the standard.

Explore my work Get in touch
THE WAY I THINK ABOUT QUALITY
Technical depth.Human perspective.
Where I’ve
made an impactUnitedMastersLoancrateBlendAxios
01 / Selected work

Quality is an ownership role.

How I turn product risk into a shared plan, build quality practices across teams, and connect technical work to customer impact.

01
UnitedMasters · Quality strategy

Setting the strategy for release confidence

Strategy / Standards / Automation

The responsibility

As the sole QA at UnitedMasters, I own quality strategy and release readiness across web and mobile while supporting more than 30 engineers. I work with product, design, and engineering to prioritize critical journeys, identify gaps, and make release risks visible.

PlaywrightAPI testingCI/CD

Leadership in practice

  • An end-to-end Playwright system covering 88 smoke, sanity, and regression flows, with automated pull-request quality gates.
  • Led 50+ cross-functional bug bashes across 5+ teams and raised 100+ testability and coverage tickets to surface issues earlier.
  • Connect production findings and exploratory edge cases to regression coverage, so release decisions are supported by evidence.
02
Blend / Bilt + UnitedMasters · Mobile

Owning release risk across mobile systems

iOS / Android / Integrations

The responsibility

I was the sole QA for Bilt credit-card mobile experiences at Blend, and I own mobile QA at UnitedMasters. These products put real customer money, work, and trust behind each interaction.

Physical devicesXcodeAndroid Studio

Decisions and customer impact

  • Critical-path validation across mobile apps, APIs, and third-party integrations.
  • At Bilt: card activation, payments, transaction history, and rewards behavior.
  • Coordinate test planning, defect priorities, release sign-off, and hotfix validation to protect critical customer workflows.
  • Device diagnostics and console logs to understand failures beyond what the screen shows.
03
Axios · Accessibility

Leading accessibility across disciplines

WCAG / Screen readers / Collaboration

The responsibility

As an Accessibility Steward at Axios, I partnered with design, product, and engineering to find barriers, support remediation, and keep accessibility in the release conversation.

WCAG 2.1 AAVoiceOverNVDA

What changed

  • Helped improve the measured accessibility score from approximately 30% to 85% through audits, remediation, and ongoing validation.
  • Combined tools including axe DevTools and Siteimprove with screen-reader testing.
  • Provided engineering guidance to connect technical findings to user impact.

The score reflects the assessment used; it is not a claim of complete WCAG conformance.

These are summaries of my professional contributions. Employer source code, customer data, and internal test artifacts are not published here.

02 / How I lead

Set the direction.
Build shared ownership.

Quality leadership means giving teams a clear view of risk, practical standards, and useful feedback. I connect business priorities to technical coverage while helping others strengthen their own quality practice.

  1. Set a risk-based quality strategy

    Prioritize critical journeys, dependencies, and the consequences of failure. Match test coverage to customer impact and release constraints.

  2. Align engineering, product, and design

    Turn requirements into shared test plans, defect priorities, and release criteria. Make gaps visible early enough for teams to act.

  3. Develop people and consistent practices

    At Blend, mentored 6+ internal and vendor QA engineers and standardized test plans, defect evidence, reporting, and release-readiness practices.

  4. Connect technical work to business impact

    Use automation to reduce repetitive validation, investigate production failures, and protect payment and access workflows. Keep exploratory testing and accessibility central to coverage.

03 / A little about me

An engineer’s curiosity.
A first responder’s calm.

ISTQB CTFLIAAP WAS

I’m a quality engineering leader with a full-stack development background and experience across fintech, media, web, and mobile. At UnitedMasters and Loancrate, I combine hands-on automation with quality ownership and the work of building stronger engineering practices.

Before software, I served in the U.S. Air Force as a military police officer and Phoenix Raven, then worked as a wildland firefighter with CAL FIRE. Those experiences shaped how I approach responsibility, teamwork, and decisions under pressure.

I bring that same care to software leadership: set clear expectations, help people succeed, and follow through. In the Air Force, I supervised 15 officers—an early foundation for how I approach responsibility and team development.

Tools I work with

Playwright · Cypress · Selenium · Postman · JavaScript · TypeScript · Python · SQL · GitHub Actions · Jenkins · Xcode · Android Studio · axe DevTools · VoiceOver · NVDA

04 / Let’s connect

Let’s build a stronger
quality practice.

For quality engineering leadership opportunities, team-building conversations, or a complex product challenge, I’d love to connect.

Start a conversationEmail Alicia alicialivingston04@gmail.comConnect on LinkedIn ↗Based in California