Lead Product Quality Assurance Engineer

The Role

As a Quality Engineering Lead, you will own the end-to-end testing lifecycle for software products — from strategy through release — ensuring quality, reliability, and on-time delivery. You will anticipate and resolve complex problems across teams, lead and collaborate with professional peers and leadership, and make in-depth, data-informed decisions that drive quality outcomes across your product area. You will partner closely with developers, product managers, and business analysts to define testing requirements, implement effective automation strategies, and accelerate delivery while reducing manual testing overhead.

A critical part of this role is anticipating post-production risks driven by technology or environment changes, and working proactively with support teams to resolve them before they become production incidents. You will lead a globally distributed QE team and will be expected to structure work, communication, and collaboration rhythms that keep the team aligned and progressing across time zones. You will also champion the Quality Engineering strategy across your products, driving test efficiency and speed through modern automation techniques and AI-assisted testing practices.

What You'll Be Doing

Test Planning & Strategy

• Develop and document comprehensive test strategies and plans aligned with project goals, defining objectives, scope, deliverables, and success criteria
• Identify required testing types and plan resources, schedules, and tooling to support testing activities
• Champion shift-left testing principles — engage early in the product development lifecycle to surface testability gaps, design risks, and integration complexities

Test Execution Management

• Oversee preparation and execution of test cases, ensuring thorough requirements coverage; monitor testing progress, enforce adherence to plan, and manage defect tracking, reporting, and resolution
• Step in as a hands-on contributor when the situation requires it, including executing smoke and regression test suites and making real-time go/no-go assessments
• Define and track key performance indicators — defect density, test coverage, execution rates — and present quality trend reports to stakeholders

Test Automation Leadership

• Lead the design, development, and maintenance of test automation frameworks
• Balance manual and automated testing based on project context and risk profile
• Drive continuous testing integration within CI/CD pipelines

Stakeholder Communication, Collaboration & Test Coordination

• Serve as the primary point of contact for all testing-related queries and provide regular updates on test progress, metrics, and results
• Coordinate cross-team System Integration Testing (SIT) and User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
• Plan and manage working model overlaps for a distributed team across time zones
• Escalate critical issues and risks to appropriate stakeholders promptly and clearly

Risk & Issue Management

• Anticipate and resolve complex testing-phase risks early with structured mitigation strategies
• Track and resolve critical issues before release, proactively clearing bottlenecks and dependency conflicts

What You Should Bring

Technical Expertise

• Comprehensive knowledge of software testing disciplines — functional, regression, integration, performance, and exploratory
• Proficiency in test management tools such as TestRail, XRay, Qtest, or Quality Center
• Hands-on experience with test automation frameworks — Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, or Puppeteer
• Working knowledge of GitHub and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions or Jenkins)
• Strong understanding of AI in testing and demonstrated ability to drive AI adoption within QE practices

Process & Methodology

• Proven experience leading end-to-end testing lifecycles (STLC) within Agile delivery models
• Strong knowledge of SDLC and Agile practices, with hands-on experience using Agile planning tools such as Jira
• Demonstrated ability to apply shift-left principles
• Ability to align testing strategy with business goals and delivery commitments

Leadership & Communication

• Strong interpersonal and team-building skills with experience working across business and technical functions
• Ability to motivate, guide, and resolve conflicts within a QE team
• Adaptable and solutions-oriented
• Comfortable being the sole QE voice in the room
• Experienced leading distributed teams across multiple time zones
• Proven ability to coordinate across multiple teams and stakeholder groups, particularly for SIT and UAT
• Clear, effective communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Attention to detail in defect identification, isolation, and documentation