Siva Kumar

About Siva Kumar

Dynamic QA Leader with 19+ years of experience, including 11+ in senior leadership, driving enterprise-wide quality strategy, automation, vendor oversight and release governance across global product portfolios. Adept at building scalable QA organizations, unifying testing standards, and embedding quality within Agile and DevOps pipelines to accelerate delivery and improve business outcomes.Proven success in cutting release cycles by 50%, boosting automation coverage by 40% and delivering $175K+ in cost savings through open-source frameworks. Skilled in AI-driven testing, cloud-based performance engineering and CI/CD enablement using tools such as Selenium, Playwright, JMeter, Jenkins, Azure, and AWS/Kubernetes.Recognized for strong stakeholder and executive partnership, with proven expertise in engaging business leadership to align quality goals and strategies with organizational objectives and customer outcomes. Adept at fostering cross-functional collaboration, mentoring diverse and geographically distributed teams, and driving innovation to deliver customer-centric, resilient, and high-performing solutions that advance business and operational excellence.

Experience

1. Head of Quality Assurance

   Cisco

   Oct 2021 — Present · Hyderabad, IN

   Led end-to-end quality strategy, QA governance, automation, and release readiness for Webex CPaaS, unifying quality practices and strengthening product reliability.Strategic QA LeadershipDefined and enforced unified test strategies and release criteria, ensuring consistent quality benchmarks.Built a centralized QA org, assigning product-specific SMEs for user-centric testing (workflows, accessibility, localization).Drove excellence in test planning, risk-based prioritization, and continuous QA documentation improvement.Automation, Shift-Left & DevOpsArchitected and scaled test automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium) with Jenkins CI/CD, boosting coverage from 31% to 83%.Advocated Shift-Left practices (early design reviews, static code analysis, BDD/TDD), reducing defect leakage by 15%.Set QA standards via Test Pyramid, maximizing unit/integration tests.Performance & ReliabilityLed performance, resilience, load, BCP, DR, and integration testing across all products.AI-Driven QA & ToolingChampioned AI for test generation, automation, and flaky test detection.Piloted new AI tech for efficiency gains; governed QA tools (qTest, Playwright, Selenium, JMeter, etc.), ensuring tool compliance.Release Governance & MetricsOwned build certification and release readiness, validating go/no-go via CI/CD exit criteria.Published dashboards tracking key KPIs (Test Coverage, DER, Release Health).Institutionalized “Risk & Coverage” reviews, cutting customer-reported issues by 15%.Stakeholder EngagementAligned with Product, Engineering, and partners to set priorities, manage risks, and ensure seamless go-to-market execution.Presented QA metrics and risk updates to senior leadership.Key OutcomesReduced release cycle by 75%(to 3 weeks), boosting feature delivery and competitiveness.Delivered consistent quality, improved predictability, and positioned QA as a strategic BU partner

Education

• Anna University Chennai

  Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering

  2001 — 2005

• Anna University Chennai

  Bachelor of Engineering

  2001 — 2005