Irfan Ahmad

Experience

1. Jan 2025 — Present · Bengaluru

   Engineering Manager, QA, McKinsey & Company

   • Lead a 40+ member QA organisation through managers and leads. Transformed QA from manual, to automated, to fully agentic QA engineering. Views are my own.
   • Cut delivery time from about four weeks to under four days, holding defect leakage under 5%.
   • Designed and delivered an AI agentic testing eval framework, scaled to platform engineering teams.

2. Apr 2023 — Dec 2024 · Mumbai

   Senior Engineering Manager, upGrad

   • Headed Test and Platform Engineering: org-wide release quality, testing strategy and security practices.
   • Led three teams (Platform, UG BAU, Test Automation) of 12+ senior SDEs and SDETs.
   • Ran the org-wide VDP security and GDPR compliance programmes, reporting to the CIO.
   • Mentored SDEs and SDETs on architecture, automation, performance, security and CI/CD.

3. Apr 2022 — Apr 2023 · Mumbai

   Engineering Manager, upGrad

   • Migrated all of upGrad from AWS ECS to AWS EKS (Kubernetes) with zero issues.
   • Scale-tested the upGrad Live platform for 1K–10K live learners on real browsers and devices.
   • Built self-serve releases (Docker, EKS, Spinnaker): dev leads ship in minutes with live tests and rollback.
   • Founded the Platform team (5+ SDEs, 10+ SDETs); set up Jenkins/Spinnaker CI/CD with OWASP ZAP DevSecOps for major apps.

4. Apr 2020 — Mar 2022 · Mumbai

   QA Manager, upGrad

   • Delivered up to 20x system scalability for brand campaigns through Gatling load testing and APM.
   • Built end-to-end automation across backend, web and mobile (Java, Cucumber, Selenium, Appium, RestAssured) plus Gatling load suites.
   • Scaled Test Engineering to 20+ SDETs and ran a 5-member DevOps/SRE team, owning 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 teams (10+), reporting to the CTO; set up CI/CD on Docker, AWS ECS and Jenkins.
   • Automated 80% of releases (JIRA, Bitbucket, Confluence), cutting release time from hours to minutes.
   • Cut 1-hour test runs to 10 minutes by scaling automation to Selenium Grid, an Appium device farm and parallel CI on AWS Lambda.

6. Feb 2016 — Mar 2018 · Mumbai

   Lead QA Engineer, upGrad

   • Founded Test Engineering and led 6 SDETs, owning quality across backend, web and mobile, reporting to the Head of Engineering.
   • Set up test automation (Ruby, Python, Cucumber, Selenium, Appium, RestAssured) with CI on Jenkins and BrowserStack.

7. Apr 2015 — Feb 2016 · Mumbai

   Software Engineer - Quality, TinyOwl

   • Owned order-management quality end to end, building Ruby E2E automation for web, mobile and APIs with Jenkins CI.
   • Built a backup/restore service that resets test environments in minutes for all devs and testers.

8. Aug 2012 — Apr 2015 · Pune

   Software Engineer, then Senior Software Engineer, Amdocs

   • Ran end-to-end testing of the entire telecom product suite on the in-house test automation framework.
   • Delivered E2E test automation for Bell Canada; presented the in-house self-serve Linux batch-testing tool to the client on site in Montreal.
   • Cut ops manual effort by up to 70% for Sprint Nextel (USA) by automating payment-plan uploads and validations (QTP, VBScript, Oracle DB).

Education

Jul 2008 — May 2012. Bachelor of Engineering (IT), University of Pune. Graduated with Distinction, 70.8%.

Courses

• Oct 2023 — Mar 2024. PCP Cybersecurity, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
• Jul 2021 — Feb 2022. Leaders of Tomorrow: Leadership Program, upGrad.
• Jun 2019 — Jan 2020. Product Management Certification Program, Duke University.