Demo

Quality Assurance Lead

Airlock Digital
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 4/21/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 5/27/2026
Location: San Francisco, California - Remote

Who Are We?

About Airlock Digital

Airlock Digital is a global leader in application control and allowlisting. We seek to empower every organization to run only what they trust and operate free from malware and ransomware. 

With rapid growth across Australia, North America, and EMEA. We are committed to our core values, respect, determination, and integrity. We support a diverse and expanding global customer base. At Airlock, we pride ourselves on being a team of humble, collaborative, and driven professionals who support one another and share a passion for cybersecurity.

What We Are Looking For

Airlock Digital is seeking a Quality Assurance Lead to serve as the foundational quality leader for its product. This role is a hands-on, player-coach position responsible for defining, executing, and evolving quality assurance practices for a complex, heavy integration product while leading a small QA team.

The successful candidate will bring deep technical expertise and prior experience building and leading QA teams, while remaining actively involved in day-to-day quality execution. This role partners closely with Product to ensure quality is embedded throughout the product lifecycle and scales effectively as the organization grows.

Key Responsibilities

Quality Ownership & Execution

  • Own end-to-end quality assurance for Airlock Digital’s product, serving as the primary point of accountability for product quality outcomes.
  • Design, execute, and maintain manual and automated test coverage across functional, integration, system, regression, performance, and environment-specific scenarios.
  • Investigate and diagnose complex, hard-to-reproduce issues, including customer-specific and environment-dependent defects.
  • Remain hands-on in testing and quality analysis, particularly for high-risk or complex areas.

Integration & Environment-Centric Testing

  • Develop and execute testing strategies for a highly interoperable product operating across diverse endpoint environments and third-party integrations.
  • Ensure quality assurance extends beyond the application itself to include the environments in which the product runs, including end-user machines and configurations.
  • Anticipate edge cases and failure modes that arise only in real-world customer deployments.

QA Standards, Frameworks & Metrics

  • Define and implement scalable QA standards, methodologies, and workflows aligned with product development and release processes.
  • Establish quality metrics, defect triage practices, and release readiness criteria.
  • Build a QA foundation that supports future growth while maintaining or improving overall product quality.

Team Leadership & Development

  • Lead and support a small Quality Assurance team
  • Provide day-to-day guidance, prioritization, and technical direction.
  • Support onboarding, mentoring, performance feedback, and skill development.
  • Apply prior experience building and scaling teams to help shape the future QA organization.

Product Collaboration

  • Partner closely with Product to influence design decisions, improve testability, and embed quality earlier in the product lifecycle.
  • Provide clear, actionable insights into quality risks, systemic issues, and recurring defects.
  • Act as a thought partner, helping Product anticipate quality challenges as the product evolves.

Tooling, Compliance & Release Readiness

  • Select, implement, and maintain QA tools and frameworks, including Playwright, Cypress, TestComplete, Postman, Jira, Git, and Bitbucket.
  • Prepare QA artefacts supporting release approvals and audits.
  • Contribute to quality practices aligned with organizational and compliance requirements, including ISO 27001, where applicable.

Future-State Contribution

  • Help define the long-term QA vision, standards, and operating model.
  • Act as a trusted advisor to Product leadership on quality strategy, risk, and scale.
  • Support the growth and maturity of the QA function as the product and organization expand.

Required Skills & Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Engineering or equivalent practical experience preferred.
  • 8 years of experience in software quality assurance, test engineering, or closely related roles.
  • 3 years of experience leading or managing QA teams, including hiring, mentoring, and team development.
  • Demonstrated experience building and scaling QA practices or functions, not just operating within mature systems.
  • Experience working on complex, integration-heavy software products, rather than simple standalone or website-only applications.
  • Strong expertise in manual and automated testing methodologies.
  • Experience testing across Windows, Linux, and macOS environments.
  • Proven experience with integration testing, system testing, and environment-dependent behavior.
  • Hands-on experience with QA automation and tooling, including Playwright, Cypress, TestComplete, and Postman.
  • Proficiency with issue tracking and source control tools, including Jira, Git, and Bitbucket.
  • Comfortable operating as a player-coach, balancing hands-on execution with team leadership.
  • Demonstrated initiative and ability to adapt to changing business needs.
  • Ability to set standards, provide direction, and influence outcomes with both direct reports and peers.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate quality risks and trade-offs.
  • Pragmatic, detail-oriented, and comfortable operating in ambiguity within a scaling organization.
  • Ability to work effectively in a remote, distributed team environment.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with endpoint software, security products, and low-level system interactions (e.g., filter drivers).
  • Experience growing a QA function from a small team into a larger, more structured organization.

What We Offer

We don’t think money is everything, but we know it is an important part of your decision to apply for a role. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include responsibilities of the job, education, location, experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and internal equity, alignment with market data, or applicable laws. 

At Airlock Digital we offer a wide range of benefits to our eligible team members. Our benefit programs vary by location and can include Medical, dental, and vision insurance – 401K Plan with 4% Company Match – Life and Disability Programs – Paid Parental Leave - Paid time off and Paid Holidays – Volunteer and Birthday Time off – Home Office Allowance

Our Commitment

We believe in supporting our team members both personally and professionally. Named one of the USA’s Greatest Places to Work in 2024 and 2025, we value flexibility, trust, and a work environment that empowers our team to do their best work.

We will be assessing applications as they come in, so we encourage you to send your resume through to us as soon as possible. All official job offers from our company are extended directly by our recruitment team and will be sent through an official BambooHR document for your review and signature. Please be aware that we do not ask for any personal information in the process of extending offers of employment, such as financial details or social security numbers. Upon acceptance of any offer, we will request such information as part of the onboarding process prior to or on your first day of employment, and only after completing a background check through an authorized third-party vendor. If you receive any communication asking for personal details outside of these processes, please contact us immediately to verify the authenticity of the request. Your security is important to us, and we are committed to a safe and transparent hiring experience. No contact from recruitment agencies, thank you.

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