QA Engineering Lead

Thaia • Miami, FL

3d

About The Position

They're a growth-stage engineering organization that has recently secured significant funding to expand its senior technical team. The current team consists of 12 members (7 backend, 2 frontend, 3 manual QA). The company is transitioning from a manual-heavy QA process to an automation-first quality culture. They are seeking individuals who are interested in understanding the intricacies of the business and product, rather than just executing isolated tasks. This role is crucial for the company's next phase of growth.

Requirements

• 5+ years focused specifically on test automation.
• Track record of building or substantially owning a test automation framework at a company of similar or larger size — not just contributing to one someone else designed.
• Experience testing both backend/API-heavy systems and web frontends — given the 7:2 backend-to-frontend ratio, API/service-level automation experience is weighted heavily.
• Prior experience mentoring QA engineers or leading QA technical direction, even without a formal management title.
• Hands-on expertise with a modern automation framework — Playwright is the current default recommendation for 2026 given its unified API+UI testing, native CI/CD support, and lower maintenance overhead.
• Strong API testing skills.
• CI/CD fluency: building and maintaining pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar), test sharding/parallelization, and fast feedback loop design.
• Comfort with containerized test environments (Docker, Testcontainers) and test data management/mocking strategies.
• Able to set technical direction and get buy-in from both backend and frontend engineers without formal authority over them.
• Comfortable being the sole QA automation specialist initially, while planning for and helping build out a team.
• Strong written communication — you'll document strategy, standards, and onboarding material for future hires.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with AI-assisted testing tools (LLM-based test generation, self-healing frameworks like Testim/Mabl/Applitools) — increasingly expected in 2026 and a strong differentiator.
• Performance/load testing experience (k6, Gatling, or similar).
• Security testing basics (OWASP-level API security checks) as part of shift-left quality.
• Experience with mobile automation (Appium or Playwright mobile) if mobile is on the roadmap.
• Prior experience scaling a QA team from 1 to several engineers, including writing interview/screening processes.
• Familiarity with observability tools (Datadog, Grafana, Sentry) to correlate test failures with production signals.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a test automation framework and strategy (UI + API) that scales across a growing backend-heavy codebase (currently 7 backend / 2 frontend engineers).
• Choose and stand up the core tooling: automation framework, CI/CD integration, test data management, environments, and reporting/observability for test results.
• Reduce flaky tests and build for maintainability — self-healing locators, retries, isolation, parallelization — so the suite stays trustworthy as it grows.
• Partner with engineering leadership on the roadmap and hiring plan for additional automation QA engineers, including interview process and technical screening.
• Establish quality metrics (coverage, flake rate, defect escape rate, release confidence) and report on them to engineering leadership.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed