Job Summary:
The QA Lead owns day-to-day technical and process leadership of a cross-product QA team supporting multiple product lines (web, mobile, and API surfaces). QA management has been carried by the Development Manager as a secondary duty; this role exists to take direct ownership of QA leadership.
This is a transformation role, not a caretaker role. The QA Lead is expected to modernize the QA tech stack and processes while keeping release coverage intact: migrating an established Selenium/Java suite toward modern frameworks (Playwright), moving CI/CD quality gates from Jenkins toward GitHub Actions, and embedding AI-assisted tooling throughout. The day-to-day reality is bridging legacy and new — maintaining and extending existing Java/Selenium assets where they still earn their keep, building new coverage on the modern stack, and managing a deliberate, measured migration between the two. Candidates who only want a greenfield stack, or who only want to maintain an existing one, are not a fit.
Job Description:
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Process (progressing to full management)
- Provide daily direction, coaching, and mentorship to QA analysts and interns across all product teams; develop team skillsets, talents, and succession plans.
- Own and continuously improve QA processes, standards, and policies across product areas — test planning, review workflows, status flows, test labeling, and coverage practices.
- Review PRDs and provide guidance to the QA team when writing test plans; ensure test coverage aligns with business and technical requirements.
- Develop and maintain quality metrics (defect escape rate, automation coverage, test cycle time, automation ROI) and report regularly to R&D leadership.
- Drive a culture of continuous improvement focused on quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction; ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and industry standards (including SOC2 evidence obligations for QA processes).
- Coordinate QA capacity and prioritization across concurrent product releases; act as the primary QA point of contact for Product Managers and Development Managers.
Stack & Process Transformation
- Own the QA modernization roadmap: define, sequence, and execute the migration from the legacy toolchain to the modern one — Selenium → Playwright for UI automation and Jenkins → GitHub Actions for CI/CD quality gates — with explicit milestones, coverage parity checks, and rollback criteria.
- Bridge legacy and new: keep the existing Selenium/Java suite (qatest82) healthy and productive during the transition; decide deliberately what gets migrated, what gets rewritten, and what gets retired.
- Embed AI-assisted testing practices across the team — AI-augmented test generation, maintenance, migration assistance, and root-cause analysis — and coach analysts through the tooling and mindset shift.
- Retrain and level up the team on the new stack as part of the migration, so modernization builds capability rather than creating a single point of failure.
- Measure the transformation: track migration progress, flake rates, execution time, and maintenance cost on both stacks, and report trade-offs honestly to leadership.
Hands-On Quality Engineering
- Design and execute functional, regression, integration, performance, and exploratory testing across web, mobile, and API surfaces.
- Perform API testing (Postman, RestAssured, or similar) and data validation via SQL against commercial relational databases (Oracle, MySQL, MsSQL).
- Identify, document, and prioritize defects in Jira; partner with developers to drive root cause and resolution.
- Author and maintain living test plans, strategies, and runbooks that reflect the evolving toolchain.
Required Skills & Qualifications
- Leadership: Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and develop a QA team; experience setting direction for others and being accountable for team-level outcomes.
- Modernization Track Record: Has led or been a principal contributor to at least one significant QA tooling/process migration (e.g., framework migration, CI/CD platform change, manual-to-automated transition) — and can speak to what went well, what didn't, and how coverage was protected during the change.
- Dual-Stack Automation Expertise: Hands-on Selenium WebDriver experience (required — the existing suite runs on it) and hands-on Playwright (or Cypress with willingness to adopt Playwright). Comfort working in both worlds simultaneously is the job.
- Programming: Working proficiency in Java (existing framework) plus JavaScript/TypeScript (modern framework target). Python a plus.
- CI/CD: Experience with both Jenkins and GitHub Actions (or a comparable legacy→modern pipeline migration); able to design quality gates in either and move workloads between them.
- AI Tool Proficiency: Demonstrated use of AI-powered development or testing tools (e.g., Copilot, Claude, Testim, Mabl) to accelerate QA workflows — including using AI to assist code/framework migration — and the credibility to lead adoption across a team.
- QA Process Ownership: Experience developing and implementing QA procedures, standards, and metrics across teams or products.
- Databases: Strong SQL and experience with commercial relational databases (Oracle, MySQL, MsSQL).
- Agile: Strong understanding of Scrum/Agile methodology and DevOps principles.
- Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication; able to report quality status and migration trade-offs to senior leadership and translate defects into clear, actionable language.
Preferred Skills
- LLM/AI Feature Testing: Validating AI-generated outputs, prompt behavior, and LLM-integrated workflows for accuracy and edge cases.
- API & Web-Service Testing: Postman, RestAssured, or similar.
- Cloud & Containers: AWS exposure; Docker for reproducible test environments.
- Observability: Log/monitoring tools (Datadog, Splunk, Grafana) supporting regression detection.
- Unix/Linux comfort and Git proficiency (branching, PR workflows).
Education & Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent professional experience.
- 5+ years testing web-based applications, with direct experience writing test automation.
- 2+ years in a lead, senior, or mentoring capacity within a QA team.
Management Readiness Criteria (for progression to QA Manager)
Progression from Lead to Manager is expected once the following are consistently demonstrated:
- Team is operating effectively under the Lead's direction without escalation to the Development Manager for routine decisions.
- The modernization roadmap (Selenium→Playwright, Jenkins→GitHub Actions, AI-assisted workflows) is defined, resourced, in motion, and showing measurable coverage/efficiency gains — with legacy coverage protected throughout.
- Quality metrics are established, reported regularly, and trusted by R&D leadership.
- Demonstrated sound judgment in coaching, feedback, and performance conversations with team members.
- Effective cross-functional partnership with Product Managers and Development Managers across all product areas.
Worker Type:
Regular
Number of Openings Available:
1