QA Lead / Quality Engineering Lead

We are looking for an experienced QA Lead / Quality Engineering Lead to own and drive the quality strategy for our products. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can define the overall testing approach while also designing, building, and maintaining modern test automation frameworks.

The ideal candidate has strong experience with Playwright, API testing, CI/CD pipelines, and end-to-end quality engineering. You should be comfortable working closely with engineering, product, and DevOps teams and establishing quality as an integral part of the software development lifecycle rather than a final testing step.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the overall QA and test automation strategy across products and releases.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable end-to-end automation frameworks using Playwright.
• Develop automated functional, regression, integration, and cross-browser test suites.
• Establish appropriate testing across the UI, API, integration, and data layers.
• Define test plans, test cases, acceptance criteria, regression strategies, and release-quality gates.
• Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines and enable reliable testing as part of every build and deployment.
• Work closely with developers to identify issues earlier in the development lifecycle and promote shift-left testing practices.
• Build and maintain API test automation for REST APIs and other service integrations.
• Develop strategies for test data management, environment management, mocking, and service virtualization where appropriate.
• Analyze test failures, application logs, and system behavior to identify root causes rather than simply reporting defects.
• Establish meaningful quality metrics and provide visibility into test coverage, defect trends, automation reliability, and release readiness.
• Identify flaky tests and continuously improve the reliability and execution speed of the automation suite.
• Participate in architecture and design discussions to identify testability and quality risks early.
• Mentor QA engineers and help establish engineering best practices across the QA function.
• Evaluate and introduce new testing tools and approaches, including the appropriate use of AI-assisted testing and automation.

Required Skills

• 8-10 years of experience in software quality engineering, QA automation, or related roles, including experience leading QA initiatives or teams.
• Strong hands-on experience with Playwright for modern web application automation.
• Strong programming experience with TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, Java, or a comparable language.
• Experience designing automation frameworks rather than only writing individual automated test cases.
• Strong understanding of API testing and tools/frameworks such as Postman, REST Assured, Playwright API testing, or equivalent.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD environments such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or similar.
• Strong knowledge of functional, integration, regression, smoke, exploratory, and end-to-end testing methodologies.
• Experience with cross-browser and responsive application testing.
• Familiarity with SQL and database/data validation.
• Strong understanding of Git and modern software development workflows.
• Experience working in Agile engineering environments.
• Strong debugging, analytical, and root-cause-analysis skills.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with engineering, product, and business stakeholders.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with performance and load testing using tools such as k6, JMeter, or equivalent.
• Experience testing applications built using modern frontend frameworks such as React, Angular, or Vue.
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and cloud-based environments.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience testing distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
• Familiarity with observability platforms and using logs, metrics, and traces for troubleshooting.
• Experience with accessibility and security testing.
• Experience with visual regression testing.
• Exposure to AI/LLM-based applications and approaches for testing non-deterministic AI systems is a plus.