Lead QA Engineer

About the Role We're looking for a Lead QA Engineer to own the quality strategy for our products and lead a team of QA engineers. You'll define how we test — from overall strategy and planning through to execution standards — and ensure the work of the QA team consistently meets that bar. This is a hands-on leadership position: you'll guide and review the work of junior QA engineers, shape our automation practice, and be the voice of quality across the engineering organization. What You'll Do Plan and own the testing strategy across projects: define scope, approach, risk assessment, entry/exit criteria, environments, and test deliverables. Review and validate the work of junior QA engineers — test plans, scenarios, scripts, and defect reports — providing coaching and feedback that raises the team's quality bar. Mentor and develop the QA team through pairing, structured review, and knowledge sharing. Design, build, and maintain automated test suites, and set the standards for when and how the team automates. Lead defect triage: ensure defects are well-reported, correctly prioritized, and driven to closure. Report on quality: test coverage, execution progress, defect trends, and release readiness for stakeholders. Collaborate closely with developers, product owners, and designers within an Agile/Scrum team to build quality in from the start. Continuously improve QA processes, tooling, and practices. What You'll Bring 5+ years of QA/testing experience, with at least 1–2 years leading or mentoring other QA engineers. Proven experience creating and owning test strategies and test plans for complex applications. Strong command of testing fundamentals: scenario and script design, functional, regression, and negative testing, and defect lifecycle management. A sharp eye for reviewing others' test work — spotting coverage gaps, weak scenarios, and unclear defect reports. Hands-on experience working in an Agile/Scrum environment. Excellent communication skills: able to give constructive feedback to the team and clear quality reporting to stakeholders. Nice to Have QA automation experience is strongly preferred — Playwright, Selenium, or comparable frameworks (Cypress, WebdriverIO, etc.). Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. AI fluency — practical experience using LLM tools (Claude or others) to accelerate test design, script development, and test data generation. Domain exposure to enterprise applications (e.g., banking, insurance, travel/booking systems). ISTQB or equivalent testing certification