Lead QA Engineer

Headquarters: Remote (US) About the Role As a Lead QA Engineer, you'll own testing strategy and quality standards across our most important work; Deciding what should be automated, what needs a human eye, where the real risk is hiding, and acting on it. You'll work hands-on across both manual and automated testing, splitting your time based on what a given release actually needs, while mentoring other engineers and acting as the go-to voice on quality across projects. You've got the critical thinking skills to chase down a hard bug yourself, know when to ask for help and delegate, and the range to set direction for how the whole team approaches quality. You seek to help your coworkers and do so regularly. Key Responsibilities Lead test strategy and quality standards across multiple projects, deciding what warrants automated coverage versus focused manual and exploratory testing. Build and maintain automated test suites in Playwright, and use BrowserStack to validate compatibility across browsers, devices, and platforms. Define and run deep manual and exploratory testing on new, ambiguous, or high-change-rate work where automation isn't the right investment yet. Translate requirements into concrete test plans and acceptance criteria, catching gaps in the requirements themselves before they become gaps in the product. Act as the technical point of contact for quality with stakeholders: communicate risk, resolve disagreements about scope, and negotiate realistic testing timelines. Write clear, actionable defect reports in Jira, drive them to resolution, and verify fixes actually hold up under retest rather than just passing a second glance. Use Jira's linking and epic structure to keep testing work traceable, and flag workflow friction in the board with the team before it slows down the SDLC. Mentor other QA engineers in both manual technique and automation practice, including how to write tickets clearly and so well that they need no follow-up clarification, raising the bar on testing across the team, not just on your own projects. Step into any project at any phase to assess its quality risk and recommend a concrete path forward. Stay ahead of testing tools and practices worth adopting, and bring the right ones into real workflows deliberately. Operate and champion the use of AI tooling with an understanding that its output is useful, but not infallible. You treat AI as a tool, not a coworker. Craft & Leadership Balance Estimated 60% leadership, 40% craft. Qualifications Required 6-8 years of experience in software quality assurance or testing, ideally with exposure to consulting or multi-stakeholder environments. Strong, hands-on experience with Playwright for building and maintaining automated test suites and frameworks. Experience using BrowserStack (or a comparable cross-browser/device testing platform) to validate compatibility across platforms. Deep grounding in manual, exploratory, and regression testing, with the judgment to know when automation is and isn't the right investment. Proven ability to translate ambiguous requirements into concrete, actionable test plans and acceptance criteria. Strong Jira practice: writing tickets so well that no follow-up or clarification is needed, using issue-linking for traceability, and spotting workflow friction before it becomes a team-wide problem. Experience testing across a range of CMS or SaaS platforms rather than a single stack, since our client environments vary and this role needs to move between them. Exceedingly strong communication skills, including presenting technical risk and testing tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. It cannot be stressed enough how important this item is: communication is the whole ballgame. Prior experience as a technical or testing lead on large or multi-phase projects. Preferred Familiarity with performance testing (e.g. Lighthouse) and accessibility testing (e.g. Axe, WCAG guidelines). Experience integrating automated tests into CI/CD pipelines. Experience with structured te