QA Lead

We are looking for a hands-on QA Lead to own quality across a large-scale, multi-tenant enterprise web platform with complex transactional workflows, multiple third-party integrations, and data-intensive features.

This is a technical leadership role, not a process-only management role. Beyond defining QA strategy and leading the team, you are expected to verify issues at the root-cause level: query the database, read the code, trace the logs, and confirm — or challenge — an engineer's diagnosis. You will define what "release-ready" means and be accountable for the platform working correctly in production.

You will work closely with Product Managers, Software Engineers, and DevOps teams throughout the software development lifecycle, driving quality from requirements through production operation.

Working Environment

• Backend: Node.js (TypeScript), PostgreSQL, with caching, full-text search, and message-based asynchronous processing components
• Frontend: Next.js / React
• AI/ML services: Python
• Testing: Playwright, Postman, k6
• Process: Agile/Scrum, standard issue tracking and documentation tools (Jira or equivalent)

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

1. QA Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow the QA team; set consistent testing practices and high engineering standards.
• Define and continuously improve QA processes, testing standards, release criteria, and quality metrics (defect escape rate, automation coverage, time-to-verify).
• Plan and allocate testing capacity across parallel product streams; ensure testing activities complete on schedule without sacrificing depth.
• Partner with Engineering and Product teams to establish quality objectives for each release.

2. Test Strategy & Planning

• Participate in requirement reviews, technical design discussions, and sprint planning to surface quality and integration risks early.
• Define risk-based test strategies, test plans, and coverage across functional, regression, integration, end-to-end, and user acceptance layers.
• Review and approve test cases, test reports, and release readiness documentation.

3. Deep Verification & Triage

• Reproduce and isolate reported issues down to root cause: distinguish frontend, API, data, integration, and infrastructure failures.
• Verify data states directly in relational databases and search indexes; trace requests through gateway and service logs.
• Read backend and automation code well enough to confirm or challenge a proposed root cause, and to validate that a fix addresses the cause rather than the symptom.
• Track defect resolution and verify fixes against root cause before production deployment.

4. Test Automation

• Design, build, and maintain the automated testing framework (Playwright) for web and API layers.
• Grow automated regression coverage and reduce manual regression effort release over release.
• Review automation code and enforce automation best practices.
• Integrate automated suites into CI/CD pipelines as blocking quality gates.

5. Integration & Asynchronous Systems Testing

• Test event-driven and asynchronous flows: message processing, retries, idempotency, and eventual consistency (e.g., search index and cache synchronization).
• Own the test strategy for third-party integrations (payment and other external services): sandbox usage, contract validation, and failure-mode simulation (timeouts, partial failures, reconciliation).

6. Security & Access Control Testing

• Design and execute multi-tenant data isolation tests: cross-tenant access attempts, IDOR, and role/permission boundary cases.
• Test authentication and authorization flows (OIDC/JWT, role- and policy-based access) across organization and user roles.
• Apply OWASP Top 10 awareness in test design; verify security fixes together with the engineering and security teams.

7. Release Quality & Production Assurance

• Define and enforce release quality gates and deployment readiness criteria.
• Maintain production smoke and post-release verification suites; validate every production release.
• Participate in incident triage and root-cause analysis; convert production incidents into permanent regression tests.
• Ensure software releases meet quality, security, and stability requirements.

REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in Software Quality Assurance; at least 2 years leading QA teams or owning QA processes.
• Strong SQL (PostgreSQL): able to write verification queries and independently confirm data states.
• Able to read TypeScript/JavaScript at a level sufficient to review automation code and validate root-cause analysis.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining automated testing frameworks using Playwright or equivalent tools.
• Strong REST API testing experience (Postman or similar), including authenticated flows (JWT/OIDC).
• Experience testing systems with asynchronous or event-driven components (message queues, background jobs) and eventual-consistency behavior.
• Security testing fundamentals: authorization testing, IDOR, OWASP Top 10.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines as quality gates.
• Strong understanding of SDLC and STLC; experience with Agile/Scrum and Jira.
• English reading skills sufficient for technical documentation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience testing multi-tenant SaaS, e-commerce/marketplace, or payment systems.
• Performance testing with k6: load profiles, thresholds, and CI integration.
• Experience testing AI-assisted or search/ranking features: golden datasets, output-quality regression, relevance evaluation.
• Ability to read Python for validating AI/ML service behavior and diagnosing issues in AI-assisted features.
• Data pipeline testing experience: data synchronization validation, source-to-target reconciliation, data quality checks.
• Experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments (data protection regulations such as PDPL or GDPR).
• Familiarity with containerized environments and centralized logging/observability tooling.
• Experience establishing QA metrics, dashboards, and release quality reporting.
• ISTQB Foundation or Advanced Certification.