Sr. Engineering Operations & QA Lead

Location: On-site – Everett, WA area (I-5 corridor)

Reports To: CTO / VP of Engineering (Trey Overton)

Playcast is a peer-to-peer streaming application delivering shared, real-time gaming experiences with ultra-low latency. We’re an aggressively startup-minded team, backed by fresh investor funding, and building a product designed to disrupt how people play together online. Our tech stack spans AWS cloud services, modern (JavaScript) web frameworks, native (C ) Windows integration, and advanced networking.

We move fast, innovate constantly, and believe in data-driven decision-making to guide team success.

We’re looking for a hands-on Engineering Operations & QA Lead to manage two small but high-impact teams:

• Ops Team (3 people): Owns DevOps, internal tools, analytics, and the foundation for future AI capabilities.
• QA Team (2 people): Owns all testing efforts and will lead the charge in building our automated testing suite from the ground up.

This is a player-coach role—you’ll be directly involved in technical work while also guiding these teams toward measurable success. As we grow, these responsibilities will split into two dedicated leadership roles, but right now we need a versatile, experienced leader who can make both areas thrive.

Operations

• Lead our AWS-based infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and operational tooling.
• Drive improvements in reliability, cost efficiency, and observability.
• Guide adoption of automation and AI-assisted development workflows.
• Establish and track metrics for deploy velocity, uptime, and operational health.

Quality Assurance

• Build out our automated test strategy and integrate it into our CI/CD workflows.
• Oversee functional, regression, performance, and integration testing.
• Mentor engineers in writing and maintaining automated test coverage.
• Track and act on quality metrics—release readiness, regression frequency, test pass rates.

Leadership

• Manage two small teams, providing direction, prioritization, and mentorship.
• Set measurable goals for both Ops and QA and ensure accountability.
• Work cross-functionally with development leadership to deliver high-quality, rapid releases.

• 5–10 years in engineering, with leadership experience in both DevOps/operations and QA/test automation.
• Deep expertise in AWS services (ECS, EC2, IAM, CloudWatch, S3, RDS, etc.).
• Strong CI/CD experience and familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Hands-on experience with test automation frameworks (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, etc.).
• Proven track record of building and acting on data-driven engineering metrics.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving, early-stage startup with shifting priorities.

• You get to shape two foundational teams at a company poised for rapid growth.
• You’ll have hands-on influence in both infrastructure and product quality.
• We’re backed by new funding, so you’ll have resources to grow your team.
• On-site role in the Everett, WA area, with a focus on making the commute as convenient as possible despite regional traffic challenges.

Our product is fun—you’ll help bring gaming innovation to life.