JOB DESCRIPTION
QA Team Lead
Department
Quality Assurance
Reports To
Program Manager
Function
Engineering & QA
Direct Reports
QA Engineer(s)
Employment Type
Full-Time
Level
Team Lead
We're looking for a QA Team Lead to own quality across our product delivery lifecycle — from test planning through to release sign-off. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll manage a team of QA Engineers, build and run a disciplined testing process, and act as the key quality checkpoint between Engineering, DevOps, and Product. You'll be equally comfortable coaching your team through a tricky defect triage and standing in front of stakeholders to explain why a release isn't ready yet.
We're a process-driven organisation with clearly defined quality gates, defect SLAs, and release readiness standards. You don't need to build this from scratch — but you do need to be excellent at running it, improving it, and holding the line when it matters.
- Lead, coach, and grow a team of QA Engineers — including workload planning, performance management, and skill development.
- Own hiring and onboarding for the QA team, including training new hires on our testing tools and quality standards.
- Run regular team retrospectives and turn recurring issues into concrete process improvements.
- Represent QA in sprint planning, backlog grooming, design reviews, and release meetings.
- Flag resourcing, tooling, or skills gaps to your manager early, backed by data (defect trends, coverage gaps, missed SLAs).
- Set the team's day-to-day rhythm: sprint-level test planning, defect triage, and monthly quality reporting.
- Own the end-to-end test planning process: requirements review, test strategy, test case design, test data preparation, execution, defect logging, retest, and sign-off.
- Make sure QA is involved from the start of each sprint — test coverage should be planned before development begins, not bolted on afterward.
- Keep core QA deliverables current every sprint: test plans, test cases mapped to acceptance criteria, test data, the regression suite, the defect log, and a release readiness summary.
- Run the required test types every sprint — functional and regression testing as standard, smoke testing after every deployment, integration testing for API changes, and performance/security testing for major releases.
- Jointly own the Definition of Done with the development team — a story doesn't move forward until both development and QA have signed off.
- Own the handover checklist into user acceptance testing, confirming the technical side is ready before business stakeholders get involved.
- Maintain a clean, well-documented defect lifecycle — clear titles, severity ratings, reproduction steps, expected vs. actual behaviour, and environment details on every ticket.
- Enforce defect response times based on severity, escalating critical issues immediately and routine ones on a predictable cadence.
- Make sure nothing gets closed without being properly retested, and that visual or design-related issues get sign-off from the design team before being dismissed.
- Own the extra QA steps required whenever AI tools have been used in development — reviewing security scan results, checking that AI-referenced code libraries and functions are real and behave as expected, running full regression on any AI-touched code, and confirming any resulting technical debt gets logged.
- Apply the team's internal quality marker to any AI-assisted work once QA has signed off — this is what confirms the work is ready to move forward.
- Make sure the team never enters proprietary code, client data, or credentials into any AI tool.
- Sign off on release readiness, confirming all planned work has cleared testing and no serious defects remain open.
- Provide QA's security validation as part of the pre-release security review.
- Confirm regression results and coverage targets are met before a release is cleared for the next stage.
- Work closely with DevOps on any post-release issues, including confirming environment stability and supporting rollback decisions if something goes wrong.
- Act as QA's point of contact for the design team on visual or UX-related defects, and respond quickly when a design question needs QA input.
- Coordinate with Business Analysts on preparing acceptance testing scenarios.
- Report on team and quality metrics to your manager on a regular cadence.
- Proven experience managing and developing a QA team (8+ people), including performance conversations.
- Confident stakeholder management — you're comfortable representing QA to Product, Engineering, DevOps, and senior leadership.
- A track record of running structured retrospectives and turning quality data into real process improvements.
- Experience building or running a structured, repeatable QA process — not ad hoc testing.
- Comfortable working with issue-tracking tools (e.g. JIRA), defect classification systems, and clear documentation standards.
- Used to working within multi-step approval processes and holding a firm line on quality standards, even under release pressure.
- Solid grounding in the full testing lifecycle: functional, regression, smoke, integration, performance, and security testing.
- Familiarity with security scanning tools and vulnerability/dependency checks, and how to read their output.
- Working knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and environment structures (dev, QA, staging, UAT, production) and how QA fits into each stage.
- Comfortable with the idea of validating AI-assisted code — checking for issues like fabricated dependencies or silent regressions. No prior experience required; we'll provide training.
- 10+ years in Quality Assurance, including at least 2 years leading a QA team.
- Experience working in a structured, process-driven environment is a strong plus.
In this role, you'll be measured on outcomes like:
Defects caught before they reach client testing
Fewer than 1 in 20 slip through
Defects caught before they reach production
Fewer than 1 in 50 slip through
Test coverage on new code
80%+
On-time readiness for client testing
85%+ of the time
Regression pass rate per sprint
95%+
Team sign-off compliance rate
90%+
