Senior Quality Assurance Engineer Lead

Position Overview

Our client is seeking a Senior QA Automation Engineer / Lead to champion the evolution and quality of core technology products. The ideal candidate will possess a strong balance of hands-on technical expertise in automation and strategic coordination to help transition teams toward an automation-first testing strategy.

The person stepping into this role will join one of five Scrum teams (each consisting of 7–10 members and 2 QA professionals). Because this role serves as a key technical point of contact, SME, and coordination anchor across all five teams, the actual hands-on testing allocation within their assigned team is reduced (e.g., approximately 20 hours per week), allowing dedicated capacity for cross-team quality initiatives, code reviews, and framework support. The testing framework in Playwright is already established so the candidate does not need to build it from scratch but must possess sufficient middling-to-strong knowledge of Playwright and TypeScript to hit the ground running within a couple of weeks. Furthermore, while general API testing is secondary, deep familiarity with AWS environments heavily focused on AWS Lambdas is a critical technical requirement.

Essential Responsibilities

• Process & Strategy Leadership: Champion and guide the transition toward an automation-first testing mindset, establishing uniform QA processes, testing standards, and quality gates within CI/CD pipelines.
• Framework Maintenance & Support: Maintain, scale, and optimize existing automated test frameworks built on Playwright and TypeScript across web applications and Windows services.
• Cross-Team Coordination & SME Support: Act as the primary technical point of contact and subject matter expert (SME) to assist QA members across all 5 engineering teams when complex issues or environment challenges arise.
• AWS & Lambda Testing: Oversee and execute testing within AWS environments, with a heavy emphasis on validating AWS Lambda-based applications and services.
• Performance & Load Testing: Lead and assist with performance testing initiatives and load testing strategies utilizing JMeter.
• Collaboration & Quality Metrics: Collaborate closely with Product, Development, and Scrum teams during design reviews, track and report defect metrics, and present quality findings to management.

Qualifications

• Experience: Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience) and 10 years in software quality assurance, with at least 2 years in a senior, lead, principal, or SME role.
• Core Automation Stack: Strong, hands-on experience creating and maintaining automated test frameworks using Playwright and TypeScript.
• Cloud & Services Testing: Proven experience testing within AWS environments (specifically AWS Lambdas), web-based applications, and Windows operating systems/services.
• Tools & Methodologies: 5 years of experience managing test plans, test cases, and workflows using Azure DevOps (ADO) within Agile Scrum and CI/CD pipelines.
• Performance Testing: Experience with performance and load testing using JMeter.

Location: Mesa, AZ (Hybrid in-office 2–3 days a week; (local candidates are primary; relocation candidates are considered secondary).

Work Authorization: U.S. Citizens or Green Card holders - no visa sponsorship at this time.

Position Type: Perm / Full-Time

Bonus & Equity: 15% target bonus eligible and 15% equity