Software QA Lead Engineer

The Software QA Lead Engineer is accountable for quality strategy and execution across Lirio’s cloud-native platform, user interfaces, and customer integrations. This role leads a shift-left quality approach across squads (Platform, Enterprise, Data/ML, etc.), owning test strategy, automation, and quality gates for web/UI experiences, services, APIs, event-driven workflows, and data flows in a regulated healthcare environment.

This role involves mentoring QA engineers, designing and implementing test automation frameworks, and conducting code and test reviews, while partnering closely with Engineering, Product, Cloud/SRE, and Customer Operations to ensure releases are reliable, observable, and audit-ready.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Quality Assurance Leadership (50%)

• Lead the design, implementation, and execution of comprehensive test strategy across APIs, services, event-driven workflows (Kafka), and UI surfaces.
• Own and evolve automated test coverage (unit, integration, contract, end-to-end) and maintain a risk-based manual test strategy where automation is not practical.
• Ensure test coverage for functional, regression, integration, performance, and reliability testing (timeouts, retries, idempotency, failure modes).
• Advocate for quality engineering practices (TDD where appropriate, CI quality gates, code review standards, and testability in design).
• Define and maintain quality gates in CI/CD (e.g., minimum coverage thresholds, contract test pass, critical path E2E pass, vulnerability scan pass where applicable).
• Partner with Cloud/SRE to validate release readiness via observability (logging, metrics, tracing) and operational dashboards.
• Embed quality and testability considerations into feature and system design by reviewing application logic, APIs, data models, event contracts, and UI workflows in partnership with engineers.
• Establish and enforce standards for automation quality, including flakiness reduction, stabilization practices, clear ownership, and expectations for timely remediation of broken or unreliable tests.
• Define and document QA processes and best practices.

Product Owner & Development Support (10%)

• Collaborate with product owners and developers to clarify requirements and acceptance criteria.
• Participate in backlog refinement and sprint planning to ensure testability of features.
• Facilitate agile ceremonies as needed.

Mentorship & Subject Matter Expertise (25%)

• Build and maintain shared QA practices, documentation, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms (playbooks, training, cross-coverage) to avoid single points of failure across squads and releases.
• Standardize testing approaches for event-driven systems, including message schema validation, backward compatibility, replay scenarios, idempotency, ordering assumptions, and failure handling (Kafka and similar messaging technologies).

Continuous Learning & Innovation (10%)

• Stay current with industry trends, tools, and technologies in software testing.
• Promote continuous improvement and innovation within the QA team.
• Evaluate and adopt tooling that improves cycle time (local test environments, ephemeral environments, test data management).

Production Support & Issue Resolution (5%)

• Support production releases, participate in incident triage, and drive root cause analysis with Engineering, SRE/Cloud, and Customer Operations.
• Track defect escape trends and drive corrective actions (test additions, gating changes, process improvements).
• Triage and resolve defects, collaborating with development and support teams.

Other

• Regular and reliable attendance.
• Perform other duties as assigned.