Quality Assurance Lead

QA Lead

The QA Lead is accountable for the quality assurance practice across product delivery, ensuring that software is testable, test execution is timely and transparent, critical defects are surfaced early, and releases meet agreed quality standards. This role leads day-to-day QA planning and execution, strengthens automation and regression coverage, coaches QA team members, and works closely with Product Owners and Engineering to embed quality throughout the software development lifecycle rather than treating testing as a final-stage activity.

The QA Lead is expected to create clear visibility into test readiness, progress, risk, and blockers. The role owns the operating discipline of QA: defining test approaches, ensuring execution begins when planned, maintaining useful quality metrics, driving defect triage, and escalating issues early when delivery or release quality is at risk.

Quality Leadership & Accountability

• Own the day-to-day QA practice and establish consistent expectations for test planning, execution, documentation, and release readiness.
• Ensure QA work begins when planned and that delays, blockers, environment issues, data needs, or scope gaps are identified and communicated immediately.
• Create transparency into what has been tested, what remains untested, current defects, quality risks, and confidence in release readiness.
• Hold QA team members accountable for execution commitments, timely updates, accurate status reporting, and follow-through.
• Coach QA team members on testing discipline, risk-based thinking, root-cause analysis, and stronger ownership of outcomes.

Test Strategy, Planning & Execution

• Develop and maintain test strategies for new features, enhancements, integrations, defects, and platform changes.
• Partner with Product Owners early in discovery and refinement to identify test scenarios, edge cases, data needs, dependencies, and acceptance criteria before development is complete.
• Ensure test cases provide adequate functional, integration, regression, negative, end-to-end, and workflow coverage based on business and technical risk.
• Coordinate test data, environments, integrations, and dependencies required for successful QA execution.
• Confirm that critical workflows can be tested end-to-end before work is considered ready for business UAT.
• Use risk-based testing to prioritize the highest-value scenarios when time or environment constraints require tradeoffs.

Defect Management & Release Readiness

• Lead defect triage in partnership with Product and Engineering, ensuring severity, priority, business impact, and ownership are clear.
• Track critical defects through resolution and retest and ensure unresolved quality risks are explicitly documented before release decisions.
• Define and enforce practical QA exit criteria, including expectations for critical defect closure, regression completion, and stability.
• Provide an objective quality recommendation for releases based on test evidence and known risk.
• Identify recurring defect patterns and partner with Engineering and Product on preventive actions rather than relying only on downstream testing.

Automation & Continuous Improvement

• Develop and maintain a pragmatic test automation strategy focused on high-value regression, repeatable workflows, integrations, and business-critical scenarios.
• Partner with QA Automation Engineers and Engineering to increase reliable automated coverage without creating brittle or low-value automation.
• Use modern AI-assisted tools, where appropriate, to accelerate test-case creation, test-data design, automation development, and quality analysis while preserving human review and accountability.
• Evaluate test tooling, frameworks, and processes and recommend improvements that increase efficiency, coverage, and maintainability.
• Reduce manual regression effort over time by identifying the strongest candidates for automation and incorporating automated tests into delivery pipelines where feasible.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Work closely with Product Owners to ensure requirements and acceptance criteria are clear, testable, and aligned to expected business outcomes.
• Partner with Engineering on defect prevention, unit/integration test expectations, environment stability, observability, and root-cause analysis.
• Collaborate with Architecture and platform teams when quality issues involve integration, infrastructure, data movement, or systemic technical risk.
• Support business UAT by ensuring the product is genuinely ready for…