Profile

Irfan Ahmad

Software quality leader with 14+ years in software quality and 7+ years leading quality engineering teams. I am Engineering Manager, QA at McKinsey & Company in Bengaluru. Guest speaker and mentor at conferences. Views on the current role are my own.

A shorter record is on the résumé (PDF).

Experience

  1. Jan 2025 — Present · Bengaluru

    Engineering Manager, QA, McKinsey & Company

    A 40+ member QA organisation, through managers and leads. Views are my own.

  2. Apr 2023 — Dec 2024 · Mumbai

    Senior Engineering Manager, upGrad

    Test and Platform Engineering: three teams (Platform, UG BAU, Test Automation) of 12+ senior SDEs and SDETs. VDP and GDPR programmes reported to the CIO.

  3. Apr 2022 — Apr 2023 · Mumbai

    Engineering Manager, upGrad

    Founded the Platform team (5+ SDEs, 10+ SDETs). Release engineering on Docker, EKS, and Spinnaker.

  4. Apr 2020 — Mar 2022 · Mumbai

    QA Manager, upGrad

    Test Engineering scaled to 20+ SDETs, plus a 5-member DevOps/SRE team. Release quality for all products, reporting to the CTO.

  5. Apr 2018 — Mar 2020 · Mumbai

    Release Manager, upGrad

    Founded and led DevOps, SRE and Tech Support (10+), reporting to the CTO.

  6. Feb 2016 — Mar 2018 · Mumbai

    Lead QA Engineer, upGrad

    Founded Test Engineering and led 6 SDETs, reporting to the Head of Engineering.

  7. Apr 2015 — Feb 2016 · Mumbai

    Software Engineer - Quality, TinyOwl

    Order-management quality, end to end.

  8. Aug 2012 — Apr 2015 · Pune

    Software Engineer, then Senior Software Engineer, Amdocs

    End-to-end testing of the telecom product suite on the in-house automation framework.

How I lead

Checking answers a narrow question: does it do the thing we already named? Testing asks what else can happen. Operations asks whether the answer is still true after the deploy. Teams split those questions across job titles and then act surprised when the release notes and the incident channel disagree.

Tools matter, and they are not the practice. A model can propose a test, a mock, or a review comment. It cannot attend the production symptom you did not describe. The check still has to be owned by someone who understands the system.

Selected work

McKinsey & Company · Jan 2025 — Present · Bengaluru

From manual checks to agentic quality engineering

Engineering Manager, QA. The role leads a 40+ member QA organisation through managers and leads. QA moved from manual, to automated, to fully agentic QA engineering. I designed and delivered an AI agentic testing eval framework and scaled it to platform engineering teams.

  • Delivery time from about four weeks to under four days.
  • Defect leakage held under 5%.
  • The eval framework in use with platform engineering teams.

upGrad · Apr 2022 — Dec 2024 · Mumbai

Self-serve releases on Kubernetes

Two titles, kept separate. Engineering Manager, April 2022 to April 2023. Senior Engineering Manager, April 2023 to December 2024.

As Engineering Manager I founded the Platform team: 5+ SDEs and 10+ SDETs. As Senior Engineering Manager I headed Test and Platform Engineering, three teams (Platform, UG BAU, and Test Automation) of 12+ senior SDEs and SDETs, and ran the org-wide VDP security and GDPR compliance programmes, reporting to the CIO.

  • Migrated all of upGrad from AWS ECS to AWS EKS (Kubernetes), completed with zero issues.
  • Scale-tested the upGrad Live platform for 1K–10K live learners on real browsers and devices.
  • Built self-serve releases on Docker, EKS, and Spinnaker, so dev leads ship in minutes with live tests and rollback.
  • Set up Jenkins and Spinnaker CI/CD with OWASP ZAP DevSecOps for major apps.

upGrad · Feb 2016 — Mar 2022 · Mumbai

Founding quality engineering and release automation

Three titles in sequence: Lead QA Engineer, Release Manager, then QA Manager. I founded Test Engineering and led 6 SDETs, reporting to the Head of Engineering. As Release Manager I founded DevOps, SRE, and Tech Support (10+), reporting to the CTO. As QA Manager, Test Engineering was 20+ SDETs and DevOps/SRE was a 5-member team, with release quality for all products.

  • Stood up test automation in Ruby and Python, then later in Java, across Cucumber, Selenium, Appium, and RestAssured, with CI on Jenkins and BrowserStack.
  • Set up CI/CD on Docker, AWS ECS, and Jenkins, and automated release workflow across JIRA, Bitbucket, and Confluence.
  • 80% of releases automated, and release time cut from hours to minutes.
  • Test runs cut from one hour to 10 minutes on Selenium Grid, an Appium device farm, and parallel CI on AWS Lambda.
  • Up to 20x system scalability for brand campaigns through Gatling and APM.

Skills

Contact

Happy to discuss relevant engineering and quality leadership opportunities. Email [email protected]. Code is on GitHub. Professional profile is on LinkedIn.

I created CheckOps, a test automation tools and tech directory. It lives at checkops.com.