Ruslan Desyatnikov

Founder & CEO QA Mentor, Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Ruslan Desyatnikov is the founder and chief executive of QA Mentor, an independent software testing firm headquartered in New York with twelve global locations and 476 clients. He is also, more unusually, a practitioner who has staked out a contrarian intellectual position in his own field. After nearly three decades in quality assurance — running global testing for Citi’s Worldlink payment platform, building the QA function at Sterling Infosystems from nothing, and establishing a Testing Centre of Excellence at HSBC — he has spent recent years arguing that the industry’s rush toward automated and AI-driven testing has removed the thing that actually catches serious defects. His answer is Human Intelligence Software Testing, a methodology he created and named, which puts human judgement, intuition, ethics and emotional awareness back at the centre of QA, along with a defined practitioner role to go with it. The argument is grounded in a specific observation: critical failures reach production while the dashboards are green, because automation tests what someone thought to specify and nothing else. QA Mentor grew both organically and by acquiring three international testing companies, and Desyatnikov has been recognised by Marquis Who’s Who Top Executives for his work in the field.

Career Highlights

• Founded QA Mentor in 2010 and has led it to 476 clients across 12 global locations.
• Grew the firm through organic expansion and the acquisition of three international software testing companies.
• Created Human Intelligence Software Testing (HIST) and defined the accompanying practitioner role, the Human Intelligence Software Tester, now used in QA Mentor’s consulting and training across banking and finance, e-commerce and retail.
• As Global Head of Testing for Worldlink Technology at Citi, owned system and integration testing for a global payment platform handling over $325 million annually across 150 countries.
• At Sterling Infosystems, established the quality assurance department outright — methodology, process, automation, security, configuration management and performance — rising from Senior Director of QA to Global Vice President of Quality Assurance and Testing over six years; built an offshore engagement in India and opened a Mumbai testing centre, hiring 80 junior testers and developing them into senior practitioners.
• At HSBC Bank over four years, established a Testing Centre of Excellence, customised Quality Center for 3,000 IT users, and managed eight global QA teams across seven countries with more than 120 testers on critical internet banking programmes.
• Recognised by Marquis Who’s Who Top Executives for leadership in quality assurance and software testing.

Professional Journey

Desyatnikov graduated from Baruch College, part of the City University of New York, with a BBA in Computer Information Systems, and later took an MBA in Technology Management at the University of Phoenix. He entered quality assurance in the mid-to-late 1990s — the company’s own figures on this are inconsistent, ranging from “over 22 years” on an older page to “28 years” in his more recent CEO message — and began on the technical floor rather than in management, as a Lead QA Analyst at Solbright Inc. and Unicast Inc. and as a Quality Advisor at DigitalEdge. These were dot-com-era start-ups, which meant testing under conditions of extreme schedule pressure and minimal process, and it is where the instinct that testing is a judgement discipline rather than a procedural one was formed.

He then moved into the institutions where the consequences of a missed defect are measured in money. At HSBC Bank he spent four years in transaction-based environments running multiple platforms, and did the thing that distinguishes an engineer from a manager of engineers: he built the function rather than staffing it. He established a Testing Centre of Excellence, customised Quality Center across an estate of 3,000 IT users, and ran eight QA teams spread across seven countries with more than 120 testers working on critical internet banking initiatives. Coordinating testing across seven time zones for a retail bank’s public-facing systems is an exercise in process design as much as in testing.

At Sterling Infosystems — one of the largest background screening companies in the world, where a data error has direct consequences for an individual’s employment — he spent six years and arrived to find no quality assurance department at all. He built one: QA methodology, process, automation, security, configuration management and performance functions, implemented across the entire company. He was promoted from Senior Director of Quality Assurance to Global Vice President of Quality Assurance and Testing. Alongside that he stood up the offshore side, starting an engagement in India with thirty people and then opening a dedicated testing centre in Mumbai, where he hired eighty junior testers and developed them into experienced professionals. The scale-and-train model he used there is visibly the template for QA Mentor’s later global delivery structure.

He went to Citi afterwards as Global Head of Testing for Worldlink Technology, Citi’s cross-border payment platform, for about two years. The remit covered system testing and system integration for a service processing more than $325 million annually across 150 countries — a domain where a defect is not a bug report but a failed international payment.

QA Mentor was founded in 2010. The proposition came directly from what he had seen from the buyer’s side at three large institutions: that testing services were sold as bodies rather than as expertise, and that independence from the development vendor was worth paying for. The firm grew organically and through the acquisition of three international software testing companies, reaching twelve global locations and 476 clients.

The most recent chapter is the methodological one. Desyatnikov has become a vocal critic of automation- and AI-first testing on the grounds that it optimises for what has already been specified, and that the failures which actually damage a business are the ones nobody thought to write a test for. His response was to formalise an alternative rather than simply complain about the trend: Human Intelligence Software Testing, a discipline centring human judgement, intuition, ethics and emotional awareness, together with a named practitioner role, the Human Intelligence Software Tester. It is now embedded in QA Mentor’s consulting and training work in banking and finance, e-commerce and retail. It is his own framework rather than an industry standard, but it is a genuine attempt to name something the field had lost, argued by someone with close to thirty years of standing to argue it.

Education

Baruch College, City University of New York

BBA, Computer Information Systems

University of Phoenix

MBA, Technology Management