Quality Assurance Automation Lead

QA Automation Lead

About the Opportunity

We are looking for an experienced QA Automation Lead to join a remote software engineering team and help shape the next stage of its quality engineering practice.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who enjoys building automation as much as leading others. You will help define testing standards and automation strategy, contribute directly to automation development, and mentor QA engineers in adopting scalable and reliable testing practices.

The ideal candidate combines strong automation engineering experience with practical leadership skills and sound judgment around software quality. You should be comfortable working closely with Engineering and Product teams, identifying quality risks, improving testing processes, and helping a team continuously raise its technical standards.

We are particularly interested in professionals who are curious about AI-assisted software development and testing and understand how these tools can improve productivity without compromising engineering quality.

This is a full-time, remote opportunity supporting a U.S.-based software organization.

What You'll Do

• Provide technical leadership and direction for QA automation initiatives across the engineering organization.
• Define and continuously improve the automation strategy, including identifying the right areas for automation and determining where manual testing continues to provide value.
• Remain hands-on by designing, developing, reviewing, and maintaining automated tests.
• Build and evolve scalable automation frameworks using Playwright and TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Develop automated coverage across UI, API, integration, and data-validation scenarios.
• Integrate automated testing into CI/CD pipelines and help ensure test suites remain reliable, maintainable, and efficient.
• Investigate automation failures and flaky tests using logs, traces, CI artifacts, and other diagnostic information.
• Establish practical standards around test design, assertions, code quality, maintainability, and automation reliability.
• Mentor QA engineers through code reviews, pairing, technical guidance, and knowledge sharing.
• Partner closely with Engineering and Product teams to identify quality risks, troubleshoot complex issues, and improve overall testability.
• Support defect analysis and prioritization, helping distinguish application issues from automation, data, or environment-related problems.
• Provide clear assessments of testing status, product quality, and release risk to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Explore and implement AI-assisted testing practices to improve test creation, analysis, maintenance, and overall QA efficiency.
• Promote a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and engineering excellence within the QA function.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of professional software QA experience, including testing commercial software applications.
• 5+ years of experience leading or technically guiding QA teams, ideally teams of four or more engineers.
• 4+ years of hands-on automation experience with Playwright and TypeScript/JavaScript, including framework development and maintenance.
• Strong experience with functional, regression, integration, API, and end-to-end testing.
• Strong understanding of modern test automation architecture, patterns, and best practices.
• Experience testing APIs and validating application data using SQL.
• Experience working with Git-based development workflows, including branching, pull requests, and code reviews.
• Experience integrating automated testing into CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to diagnose complex automation failures and improve the stability of large test suites.
• Experience mentoring QA engineers and establishing technical standards across a team.
• Strong judgment around automation strategy, including understanding when automation does — and does not — provide value.
• Excellent English communication skills and the ability to communicate quality risks clearly to different audiences.
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to work independently, collaborate effectively, and help unblock others.

AI-Assisted Quality Engineering

We are looking for someone who is comfortable incorporating AI into modern QA workflows. You do not need to be an AI specialist, but you should have practical experience using AI-assisted development or testing tools and understand that AI-generated output requires thoughtful engineering review.

Experience in areas such as the following is valuable:

• Using AI