Senior R&D Verification Lead

What if the work you did every day could impact the lives of people you know? Or all of humanity?

At Illumina, we are expanding access to genomic technology to realize health equity for billions of people around the world. Our efforts enable life-changing discoveries that are transforming human health through the early detection and diagnosis of diseases and new treatment options for patients.

Working at Illumina means being part of something bigger than yourself. Every person, in every role, has the opportunity to make a difference. Surrounded by extraordinary people, inspiring leaders, and world changing projects, you will do more and become more than you ever thought possible.

Senior R&D Verification Lead

Tel Aviv, Israel

Onsite 4 days per week

We are looking for a Senior R&D Verification Lead to drive the verification strategy, quality assurance, and release readiness for our SaaS genomic analysis platform.

This role is full time and based onsite 4 out of 5 days a week within our Tel Aviv, Israel Office.

Illumina's employee benefits are industry-leading and include flexible time off, private medical insurance, compassion and care time off, leisure travel insurance, pension, employee stock purchasing program, volunteer time off, and much more!

About The Role

In this high-impact leadership role, you will own the end-to-end verification process, ensuring that our cloud platform meets the highest standards of functionality, performance, scalability, and reliability.

You’ll lead cross-functional quality initiatives, manage the automation verification team, and partner with R&D, Product, DevOps, and Support to ensure every release is production-ready and every escalation drives improvement.

This role is ideal for a technically strong, hands-on leader passionate about building reliable, compliant, and high-performing healthcare-grade SaaS products.

Responsibilities Include

Lead Verification & Quality Strategy

• Define and execute the comprehensive verification and validation strategy for Emedgene’s cloud SaaS platform — spanning web UI, APIs, backend microservices, and data pipelines.
• Ensure performance, scalability, and reliability are embedded into the verification lifecycle to validate large-scale genomic workloads and concurrency under real-world conditions.
  
  

Plan & Assure Release Quality

• Own release quality and readiness planning across all release trains.
• Define entry/exit criteria, manage defect review, prioritization, assignment, and resolution tracking, and provide release readiness reports.
• Lead risk assessments, pre-release validation, and sign-off activities in alignment with R&D, Product, and Quality leadership.
• Collaborate with DevOps and Operations on deployment planning, canary releases, rollback strategies, and post-deployment validation.
  
  

Manage Escalations & Drive Continuous Improvement

• Serve as the technical quality owner for production escalations.
• Partner with Customer Support and R&D to triage, prioritize, and resolve customer-reported issues efficiently.
• Conduct root cause analyses and lessons-learned reviews following major incidents or releases.
• Implement corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs) and improve test coverage and automation to minimize recurrence of production issues.
  
  

Drive Automation & Tooling Excellence

• Lead the evolution of the automation framework to increase reliability, coverage, and speed.
• Ensure automated verification covers functional, performance, and scalability aspects and integrates seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines.
  
  

Ensure Compliance & Traceability

• Maintain compliance with ISO 13485, IEC 62304, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, IVDR and AI ACT standards.
• Guarantee full traceability between requirements, verification, and validation results using JAMA or equivalent tools.
  
  

Measure, Monitor, and Improve

• Define and monitor key quality KPIs (automation coverage, defect leakage, performance benchmarks, release success rate, escalation volume, MTTR).
• Use analytics and retrospectives to drive measurable improvements in release quality and predictability.
  
  

Lead and Mentor

• Build, mentor, and develop a strong verification and automation team.
• Foster accountability, technical excellence, and collaboration across all stages of development and release.
  
  

Promote a Culture of Quality

• Champion a quality-first mindset across R&D, Product and DevOps.
• Encourage proactive identification of risks, testable designs, and continuous feedback throughout the product lifecycle.
  
  

Qualifications & Experience Required

• 8+ years of experience in software verification, validation, or QA leadership for complex SaaS or distributed systems.
• Proven experience leading verification or automation teams in a multi-team R&D environment.
• Strong technical understanding of cloud-native architectures, microservices, and API-based systems.
• Hands-on expertise with test automation frameworks (e.g., Playwright, Cypress, or custom DSLs).
• Experience managing defect triage, release readiness, and production quality monitoring.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, cloud performance testing, and observability tools (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, New Relic, Grafana).
• Experience in regulated industries such as healthcare, genomics, or medical devices.
• Strong leadership, analytical, and communication skills with the ability to influence cross-functionally.
• Knowledge of Agile/SAFe methodologies (release train) and experience with requirements/test management tools (e.g., JAMA).
  
  

We are a company deeply rooted in belonging, promoting an inclusive environment where employees feel valued and empowered to contribute to our mission. Built on a strong foundation, Illumina has always prioritized openness, collaboration, and seeking alternative perspectives to propel innovation in genomics. We are proud to confirm a zero-net gap in pay, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or race. We also have several Employee Resource Groups (ERG) that deliver career development experiences, increase cultural awareness, and offer opportunities to engage in social responsibility. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to providing employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, creed, color, gender, religion, marital status, domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, pregnancy, military or veteran status, citizenship status, and genetic information. Illumina conducts background checks on applicants for whom a conditional offer of employment has been made. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable local, state, and federal laws. Background check results may potentially result in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment. The background check process and any decisions made as a result shall be made in accordance with all applicable local, state, and federal laws. Illumina prohibits the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the application and interview process. If you require accommodation to complete the application or interview process, please contact accommodations@illumina.com. To learn more, visit: https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/posters/pdf/eeopost.pdf. The position will be posted until a final candidate is selected or the requisition has a sufficient number of qualified applicants. This role is not eligible for visa sponsorship.