At PadSplit, we're on a mission to revolutionize the affordable housing industry by leveraging technology to provide efficient and accessible solutions to the housing crisis. Our Director of Technology Operations is a key player in this mission. This role is pivotal in driving the modernization of quality assurance, IT, and security operations, ensuring PadSplit can keep up with the evolving demands of the tech-driven housing world.
The Role We Need
We’re actively seeking a Director of Technology Operations to lead the three essential functions that ensure PadSplit’s technology and business operations run smoothly: Quality Assurance, IT & internal tooling, and Security. This role is a hands-on leadership position. You’ll inherit the existing teams across each area and be responsible for transforming how they work: moving Quality Assurance toward automation, IT toward proactive enablement, and Security toward a structured, risk-based program. The role requires you to set strategy and own outcomes across all three areas, while staying close to the work to evaluate test architecture, challenge vendor renewals, or lead incident reviews.
The Person We're Looking For
We're searching for a technology leader with experience in multiple technology operations functions who knows how to turn reactive, manual processes into scalable, automated systems. Ideal candidates should be comfortable moving between strategy and execution, developing teams, and coaching where needed. Strong technical judgment, particularly across QA, IT, and Security, and the ability to translate technical risks and tradeoffs into clear business decisions are essential. Most importantly, you should be a player-coach who can modernize these functions without losing sight of the people and teams responsible for delivering the work.
Here's What You'll Be Doing Day-to-Day
- Set QA Strategy: Define what quality means at PadSplit, how it’s measured, and how quality is built into the development lifecycle rather than addressed at the end.
- Modernize Testing: Increase test automation, improve CI/CD quality gates, and move QA from manual regression toward automation engineering.
- Scale with AI: Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted testing tools for test generation, maintenance, and triage so QA can keep pace with product demand without relying solely on headcount growth.
- Develop Teams: Coach existing QA, IT, and Security team members, create career paths, and hire where additional expertise is needed.
- Improve IT: Modernize internal tools and workflows, automate repetitive processes, manage the SaaS portfolio, and identify opportunities to consolidate vendors and reduce costs.
- Build Service Standards: Establish IT SLAs, self-service resources, and documentation so employees receive fast, predictable support as the company scales.
- Lead Security: Own the security roadmap across application, infrastructure, corporate/endpoint security, and vendor risk while establishing policies, training, vulnerability management, and incident response processes.
- Lead Incidents: Serve as the escalation point for security incidents, leading response and communication and facilitating blameless postmortems that turn incidents into improvements.
Here's What You'll Need to Be Successful
- Leadership Experience: 10+ years in technology roles and 5+ years leading teams, including direct leadership experience in at least two of the three areas: QA, IT, or Security, and strong working knowledge of the third.
- Modernization Track Record: Experience transforming a manual QA organization, ad hoc Security function, or reactive IT organization into a more automated, structured, and proactive operation.
- QA Expertise: Strong knowledge of test automation, CI/CD integration, quality metrics, agile product development, and modern approaches to AI-assisted testing.
- AWS Experience: Hands-on experience with AWS and enough infrastructure knowledge to make informed QA, IT, and Security decisions.
- IT Operations: Strong grounding in IAM/SSO, MDM, SaaS administration, network security tooling, and IT budget management.
- Automation Knowledge: Familiarity with modern test automation frameworks such as Playwright, Cypress, or Selenium, with enough technical depth to evaluate architecture and coach the team.
- Business Judgment: Strong judgment around build-vs-buy decisions, vendor selection, and how to prioritize limited resources across competing technology needs.
- Executive Communication: Able to communicate clearly and directly and translate technical risks, tradeoffs, and decisions into language executives and non-technical stakeholders can understand.
The Interview Process:
