Company & Role Overview
This role owns the end-to-end testing strategy and execution across the full software delivery lifecycle. The End-to-End Quality Engineering Lead ensures product quality, mitigates risk, and enables efficient, predictable release cycles by balancing manual and automated testing approaches. This individual operates as both a hands-on technical leader and a strategic partner to Product, Engineering, DevOps, and Security teams, driving quality at scale in modern, cloud-native environments.
What the right candidate will enjoy
- Owning quality strategy from design through production and post-release monitoring
- Designing scalable, modern automation frameworks and CI/CD quality gates
- Influencing architecture, release readiness, and risk decisions across teams
- Leading and mentoring QA and Automation Engineers
- Championing API-first, shift-left, and shift-right quality practices
- Working closely with Product, DevOps, and Security leaders on high-impact initiatives
Responsibilities of the right candidate
Strategy and Planning
- Define and own the end-to-end test strategy aligned with business goals, release cadence, and risk tolerance
- Establish test objectives, entry/exit criteria, and quality gates across environments (dev, QA, staging, production)
- Build and maintain a test automation roadmap, balancing ROI, risk, and long-term maintainability
- Select, standardize, and govern testing tools and frameworks across teams
- Create and maintain test plans, traceability matrices, and test data strategies
Test Architecture and Automation
- Define automation architecture across unit, service, API, UI, contract, performance, and end-to-end layers
- Design and guide implementation of reusable automation frameworks, test utilities, and patterns
- Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines with parallel execution and environment provisioning
- Enforce test coding standards, version control, code reviews, and flakiness management practices
- Drive shift-left and shift-right quality initiatives, including contract testing, feature flags, canary releases, and production monitoring
Execution and Delivery
- Lead end-to-end test execution across sprints and release cycles
- Prioritize test coverage based on business criticality, risk, and usage analytics
- Manage test environments, configurations, and data setup at scale
- Oversee regression, smoke, and release validation testing
- Track defects, perform root-cause analysis, and partner with engineering to resolve issues quickly
Quality Engineering and Metrics
- Define and report quality metrics including coverage by layer, defect leakage, flakiness, MTTR, and release health
- Implement pipeline quality gates for functional, performance, security, and contract compliance
- Continuously optimize test suites for speed, stability, and value
- Champion non-functional testing including performance, reliability, accessibility, security, localization, and compliance
Leadership and Collaboration
- Lead, mentor, and grow QA and Automation Engineers
- Partner with Product, Engineering, DevOps, Security, Data, and Support teams to align on requirements and risks
- Facilitate test planning, story refinement, and testability reviews
- Communicate quality status, risks, and go/no-go recommendations clearly to stakeholders
Governance and Process
- Establish and enforce testing standards, defect lifecycle processes, and release strategies
- Implement test data governance, PII handling, and regulatory compliance practices
- Maintain auditable testing artifacts for regulated environments
- Manage vendor tools, licenses, and testing infrastructure budgets
Qualifications of the right candidate
Core Experience and Abilities
- 8–12+ years of experience in QA and test automation, including 3–5+ years leading end-to-end testing at scale
- Proven experience defining test strategy and quality governance across complex systems
- Strong leadership, stakeholder management, and communication skills
- Deep understanding of Agile/Scrum, DevOps practices, and release management
Core Technical Skills
- Strong coding ability in at least one test-friendly language (JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, Python, or C#)
- Expertise in API-first testing, contract testing, and modern UI automation best practices
- Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, containerized environments, and cloud platforms
- Experience with tools such as Selenium/WebDriver, Playwright, Cypress, Appium, REST/GraphQL testing tools, and performance testing frameworks
- Proven ability to design stable, maintainable automation suites and manage test flakiness
