QA Lead

Adherent • Ireland, MS

5d • Remote

About The Position

We are hiring a QA Lead who starts hands-on to run our QA team day to day. You will be embedded in one pod as a Quality Engineer, the same as the rest of the team, and you will also lead that team: three Quality Engineers report to you. You are the connection between the Engineering Manager and the QA team. The Engineering Manager sets quality strategy and direction. You turn it into day-to-day practice, feed the team's reality back up, and carry the operational load of goal setting, performance reviews, coaching, and reviewing your team's work. You stay hands-on and technical throughout.
Most of your quality leverage is upstream. Our pods spec features in depth and hand them to coding agents that build the feature and its tests together. Inside your pod you are the advocate, not the executor: the voice asking the awkward questions, pushing the failure modes nobody thought of, and making sure the spec and our shared testing skills are good enough that the agent produces the right tests, at the right level, catching the right things. Expect to be hands-on early while that foundation is still thin. Expect that to reduce deliberately over time as the skills sharpen and the pod's own quality thinking matures.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software testing experience in a commercial environment with 3+ years acting as a technical lead in QA teams.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Software Engineering or equivalent lifetime experience.
• Formal leadership experience, including performance management of a team.
• Experience in architectural and pipeline design to prevent systemic failures.
• Hands-on experience building with agentic tools and workflows, focusing on prompt engineering and LLM-based testing frameworks.
• Proficiency in performance, security, and accessibility testing.
• Experience working with modern CI/CD platforms and DevOps best practices.
• Proficiency in JIRA or similar project management tools.
• Expertise with automation tools like Cypress, Stryker, Allure, PactumJS, etc.
• Proven experience in formal management, including goal setting, coaching, and performance reviews. You use data-driven insights—such as flake rates, escape rates, and mutation scores—to guide team decisions and improvements.
• Expertise in writing and refining instructions for AI coding agents. You have the judgment to identify where they fail and utilize mutation testing to ensure generated suites provide meaningful coverage.
• Strong advocate for shift-left practices. You mentor engineers in TDD and code review standards, thriving in a pairing environment to solve complex architectural challenges.

Nice To Haves

• You are comfortable in the code and review your team's work to ensure high standards. You lead by evidence, using traces, benchmarks, and reproduction scripts to help the team make decisions.
• You look beyond individual bugs to identify pipeline or architectural failures. You contribute to engineering systemic solutions that prevent recurrence.
• You help the team understand success through metrics like mutation scores, flake rates, and production escapes, using this data to guide improvements.
• You thrive in cross-functional pods, partnering with product managers and engineers to embed quality into the development lifecycle.
• You champion the user perspective by questioning assumptions and identifying potential failure modes before development begins.

Responsibilities

• Lead the three Quality Engineers who report to you. Set their goals, run their performance reviews, coach them day to day, and review their work. You are the senior voice they turn to on what good looks like and what to do next, and the first escalation point when they are stuck.
• Be in the room while the pod specs a feature, before any code exists. Ask the awkward questions, push the edge cases and failure modes nobody has thought of, and hold the line that acceptance criteria are testable and traceable. A vague spec produces vague tests, so this is where most of your quality leverage lives.
• Our coding agents write most of our tests. Curate what they are told: the shared testing skills, patterns, and guardrails that decide what gets tested, at what level, and how. Verify the output is load bearing using mutation testing, rather than assuming a green suite means a covered feature.
• Focus on coaching over absorbing workload. Review the tests that arrive with a pull request, whether a developer or an agent wrote them, asking probing questions to ensure they prove meaningful outcomes. You raise the developers' ceiling by mentoring them on test efficacy.
• A lesson that only lands in one spec is a lesson we pay for twice. When something is missed, get the reasoning back into the shared skills, gates and patterns so the next feature starts better than the last. This is what makes the role shrink rather than grow: every fold-back reduces how much intervention the next feature needs from you.
• Coach rather than cover. You still open the editor for exploratory testing, a missing test, a gnarly end-to-end flow, or awkward test data, but that is the exception rather than how you spend your week. Expect this to be heavier in your first months and lighter as the skills mature. That reduction is the point.
• Help the team integrate performance, security, and accessibility into our quality practices. You contribute to ensuring accessibility is asserted against our live shared config.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior