Quality Engineering Lead

Position:
Technical QE Lead

Location:

Onsite (Cincinnati, OH)

Our large retail client is seeking a Technical Lead in Quality Engineering to drive modern automation practices and ensure reliable, repeatable testing for mission-critical retail checkout applications. This role is less architecture and more hands-on, a technical leadership position focused on mocking, service-level virtualization, CI pipeline design, and component-level benchmarking.

The successful candidate will be able to overcome its dependency on lab hardware by designing software-only test environments, orchestrating containers in CI, and enabling developers and QE teams to validate components quickly and independently. The role requires strong technical leadership, practical engineering skills, and the ability to influence teams that operate in a fast-moving, dynamic environment.

• Design and implement mocking and service virtualization strategies for POS software components—enabling isolated, hardware-independent testing.
• Stand up epoxy, containerized test environments in Git Hub Actions using Docker/OCI images or containerized Java services.
• Collaborate with development teams to ensure all new code paths are testable without reliance on hardware labs.
• Help guide teams in adopting true CI-first validation.

• Collaborate with teams to build and maintain Git Hub Actions workflows that deploy mocked services and supporting components for automated testing.
• Ensure test frameworks, mocked services, and performance scripts run reliably in self-contained CI environments.
• Establish patterns for reproducible test orchestration across components and services.

• Build supporting utilities, test harnesses, or mock services where gaps exist.
• Implement API-first and asynchronous message-queue testing strategies to decouple validation from physical devices and enable isolated, container-based validation.
• Troubleshoot complex interactions across components, mocked services, and CI pipelines.

• Provide technical mentoring to QE and developer teams on testability, CI integration, and performance benchmarking.
• Act as a bridge between engineering, product, and QA to ensure quality standards remain consistent and actionable.
• Champion modern testing practices and guide teams toward deterministic, container-driven environments rather than hardware-based workflows.

• Contribute to component-level performance and load test design.
• Use or support tools such as Neo Load, JMeter, or Gatling (Neo Load experience preferred).
• Ensure performance tests run in CI-based or virtualized environments where feasible.

• 7+ years in Quality Engineering or Software Engineering, with 2+ years in a senior or technical lead capacity.
• Strong experience designing mocked environments, service virtualization, or stubbing strategies in distributed systems.
• Hands-on CI/CD experience (preferably Git Hub Actions) deploying containerized applications.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern language (Java, Type Script/JavaScript, Python, or similar).
• Experience with test automation frameworks (Karate, Cypress, BDD tools, or API-focused frameworks).
• Familiarity with performance testing concepts and tooling.
• Ability to thrive in high-change, ambiguous environments where rapid decision-making is required.
• Strong communication and collaborative skills.

• Experience with retail or POS systems at the software integration layer.
• Experience building custom test harnesses or supporting frameworks.
• Experience influencing organizations transitioning from hardware-dependent testing models to modern CI-driven workflows.

This position is central to enabling component-level validation, eliminating hardware bottlenecks, and accelerating test cycles. By deploying mocked services in CI and designing stable test environments, the Technical Lead in QE will help scale quality across multiple POS components and deliver a more reliable in-store experience to millions of customers.