QA Engineering Lead

About the company

They're a growth-stage engineering org that just closed a significant funding round and are using it to build out a stronger, more senior technical team. The current team is 12 people (7 backend, 2 frontend, 3 manual QA), and they're moving deliberately from a manual-heavy QA process to an automation-first quality culture. They're looking for people who want to understand how the business and product actually work — not just execute tasks in isolation — and this hire is a key part of that next stage of growth.

Role summary

They're a mid-size engineering org (12 people) shifting from manual-heavy QA to an automation-first quality culture. You'll design and build their test automation strategy and framework from the ground up — one that scales cleanly as the team and codebase grow over the next several years. You'll set technical direction, build the first version of the framework hands-on, and lay the groundwork for hiring additional automation QA engineers. You'd report to engineering leadership, own quality strategy for a backend-heavy product (7 backend / 2 frontend engineers), and come in as a Lead / Senior IC with technical leadership — not a people-manager role on day one, but you'll mentor and later help hire 2+ automation QA engineers. This is a hands-on build role first, leadership-track second.

Key responsabilities

• Design and build a test automation framework and strategy (UI + API) that scales across a growing backend-heavy codebase (currently 7 backend / 2 frontend engineers).

• Choose and stand up the core tooling: automation framework, CI/CD integration, test data management, environments, and reporting/observability for test results.

• Reduce flaky tests and build for maintainability — self-healing locators, retries, isolation, parallelization — so the suite stays trustworthy as it grows.

• Partner with engineering leadership on the roadmap and hiring plan for additional automation QA engineers, including interview process and technical screening.

• Establish quality metrics (coverage, flake rate, defect escape rate, release confidence) and report on them to engineering leadership.

Must have

Experience

• 5+ years focused specifically on test automation.

• Track record of building or substantially owning a test automation framework at a company of similar or larger size — not just contributing to one someone else designed.

• Experience testing both backend/API-heavy systems and web frontends — given the 7:2 backend-to-frontend ratio, API/service-level automation experience is weighted heavily.

• Prior experience mentoring QA engineers or leading QA technical direction, even without a formal management title.

Technical Skills

• Hands-on expertise with a modern automation framework — Playwright is the current default recommendation for 2026 given its unified API+UI testing, native CI/CD support, and lower maintenance overhead.

• Strong API testing skills.

• CI/CD fluency: building and maintaining pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar), test sharding/parallelization, and fast feedback loop design.

• Comfort with containerized test environments (Docker, Testcontainers) and test data management/mocking strategies.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Able to set technical direction and get buy-in from both backend and frontend engineers without formal authority over them.

• Comfortable being the sole QA automation specialist initially, while planning for and helping build out a team.

• Strong written communication — you'll document strategy, standards, and onboarding material for future hires.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI-assisted testing tools (LLM-based test generation, self-healing frameworks like Testim/Mabl/Applitools) — increasingly expected in 2026 and a strong differentiator.

• Performance/load testing experience (k6, Gatling, or similar).

• Security testing basics (OWASP-level API security checks) as part of shift-left quality.

• Experience with mobile automation (Appium or Playwright mobile) if mobile is on the roadmap.

• Prior experience scaling a QA team from 1 to several engineers, including writing interview/screening processes.

• Familiarity with observability tools (Datadog, Grafana, Sentry) to correlate test failures with production signals.

If building the quality foundation from the ground up sounds like your kind of challenge, they'd love to hear from you.