QA Lead

About the Role:

We are building an AI-first product and engineering organization with rapid delivery cycles, a strong automation culture, and a modern TypeScript/Next.js-based stack.

We are looking for a QA Lead who is deeply technical, automation-first, and able to own the quality discipline end-to-end: test architecture, automation strategy, exploratory testing, reliability, and release readiness.

This is not a manual QA role — this is a technical leadership position.

Responsibilities:

Test Automation Strategy & Architecture

• Own and design the end-to-end test automation framework.
• Maintain stable, deterministic E2E test suites.
• Ensure critical user flows have robust automation coverage.
• Define and evolve the automation architecture (fixtures, mocks, selectors, utilities, data setup).

Quality Involvement in Product & Engineering Process

• Review product requirements and expand them into clear, testable scenarios.
• Identify edge cases, negative flows, and missing states early.
• Validate prototypes and UX flows before development begins.
• Ensure quality is built into the design, not added after.

Testing Execution (Strategy & Leadership)

• Define the overall testing strategy across E2E, API, integration, and exploratory layers.
• Define a balanced and efficient test pyramid.
• Build and maintain the E2E automation suite.
• Lead exploratory testing for usability, edge cases, and cross-flow scenarios.
• Validate UI behavior and flows against Product Design specs.
• Partner with backend and frontend engineers for proper API and integration test coverage.
• Identify, document, and prioritize quality risks across the system.

Collaboration

• Work closely with FE/BE engineers on test placement and coverage.
• Maintain test data strategy and mocking/stubbing layers.
• Coach engineers to write stable, maintainable tests.
• Partner with Product Design to define clear, testable selectors and states.

Release Quality & Reliability

• Approve release readiness for major deployments.
• Monitor, investigate, and reduce flaky tests.
• Improve reliability of test pipelines and CI tooling.
• Continuously enhance the stability of the release process.

Key Qualifications

Must-Have

• 4+ years of QA/QE experience, heavily focused on automation.
• Strong experience with Playwright or Cypress (or similar modern JS automation tools).
• Solid TypeScript/JavaScript skills.
• Experience building or maintaining E2E test frameworks.
• Understanding of modern frontend architecture (React/Next.js).
• Understanding of REST APIs, backend flows, and integration patterns.
• Hands-on experience in fast, iterative release environments.
• Practical experience using AI tooling in QA (e.g., AI-assisted test generation, test impact analysis, AI-based exploratory testing, or GPT/Claude/Copilot workflows).

Bonus

• Experience leading QA in AI-driven or automation-first organizations.
• Experience designing test impact analysis, selective test execution pipelines, or quality risk models.
• Experience establishing QA standards in startups or high-velocity engineering teams.
• Experience optimizing CI/CD for large test suites (parallelism, caching, orchestration).

What Success Looks Like

• Critical flows are fully automated and consistently stable.
• Release cycles run smoothly with minimal QA friction.
• Flaky tests are proactively reduced and eliminated.
• Engineers follow your automation practices and quality standards.
• Product & Engineering teams benefit from early QA involvement.
• The overall product becomes more predictable, reliable, and testable.