Steve Gates

Built and led a distributed QA team of up to 6 testers across the U.S. and India; established QA policies, processes, and the end-to-end testing lifecycle where no dedicated QA team previously existed. Partnered with business, architecture, BAs, and third-party developers to shift testing left into requirements refinement and improve lifecycle quality.

Led up to 20 testers responsible for automation, manual testing, and releases for New York State of Health ACA portals serving 4M+ customers annually. Improved automation execution speed by an average of 50%, increasing coverage across the Individual Portal without interrupting the test cycle.

Led global QA and performance engineering for financial control, customer retention, and enterprise applications; championed cross-functional process improvement. Reduced reported production defects by 90% through stronger testing of financial control and customer retention systems.

Built an enterprise functional and performance automation team from the ground up for 4 major enterprise systems. Turned a struggling QA organization into a trusted partner, reducing recurring stakeholder complaints from 1–2 per week to zero.

Helped establish performance testing as a recognized engineering discipline; within one year, development managers were requesting performance testing by name. Identified performance bottlenecks that reduced customer-facing Gateway page response time from 45+ seconds to under 10 seconds.

Maintained and expanded a custom Java-based Rational Functional Tester automation framework.

Provided Rational Performance Tester expertise for Oracle and EMC applications. Selected by IBM Rational to train customers on Rational Unified Process, Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester, and Rational Quality Manager.

Supported 15+ clients with Rational Functional Tester, Rational Performance Tester, and Rational Robot scripting, improving regression-testing efficiency by up to 25% in some environments. Architected and deployed a keyword-driven functional regression framework across 8 web applications, including back-end database verification.

Performed performance analysis with LoadRunner and improved infrastructure capacity; increased one server's capacity by 50%. Used Mercury TestDirector for defect tracking, test management, reporting, and scheduling unattended automated testing.

Provided remediation engineering and management support.

Master of Science in Business Organizational Management from the University of La Verne.

Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the U.S. Air Force Academy.