QA Lead

About the role

You will lead, hire, and develop a team of QA Engineers (II and III), running regular 1:1s, structured career development conversations, and performance reviews. You will actively participate in ongoing releases as the senior quality owner, tracking progress, unblocking the team, and holding accountability for the overall delivery of QA commitments across all active workstreams. You will own the QA strategy across all assigned product areas and development teams, ensuring test coverage standards and release governance processes align with engineering and business objectives. You will oversee the QA release process across different development teams, ensuring all releases follow the Central QA process, quality gates are enforced, and sign-off conditions are consistently met before production deployment. You will serve as the escalation point for complex defects, release-blocking quality risks, cross-team process conflicts, and resourcing concerns, ensuring the right stakeholders are engaged at the right time. You will drive the automation roadmap by setting coverage targets, evaluating frameworks, and ensuring CI/CD integration steadily reduces manual regression effort. You will attend and contribute to roadmap discussions, release planning, and retrospectives as a required participant. You will build a culture of shift-left testing, embedding quality thinking into design, planning, and code review across all teams, not just the test phase. You will coordinate QA planning across squads for major releases and platform migration. You will research and evaluate emerging QA tools and practices, making grounded build-vs-buy recommendations based on team capacity, product risk profile, and long-term quality goals. You will own the QA process documentation, reviewing quarterly and communicating updates to all engineering teams.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Lead, hire, and develop a team of QA Engineers (II and III) through regular 1:1s, structured career development conversations, and performance reviews.
• Actively participate in ongoing releases as the senior quality owner, tracking delivery commitments, unblocking the team, and holding accountability for QA commitments across all active workstreams.
• Own the QA strategy across all assigned product areas and development teams, ensuring test coverage standards and release governance processes align with engineering and business objectives.
• Oversee the QA release process across different development teams, ensuring all releases follow the Central QA process, quality gates are enforced, and sign-off conditions are consistently met before production deployment.
• Serve as the escalation point for complex defects, release-blocking quality risks, cross-team process conflicts, and resourcing concerns, engaging the right stakeholders at the right time.
• Drive the automation roadmap by setting coverage targets, evaluating frameworks, and ensuring CI/CD integration steadily reduces manual regression effort.
• Attend and contribute to roadmap discussions, release planning, and retrospectives as a required participant.
• Build a culture of shift-left testing, embedding quality thinking into design, planning, and code review across all teams, not only during the test phase.
• Coordinate QA planning across squads for major releases and platform migration initiatives.
• Research and evaluate emerging QA tools and practices, making grounded build-vs-buy recommendations based on team capacity, product risk profile, and long-term quality goals.
• Own the QA process documentation, reviewing it quarterly and communicating updates to all engineering teams.
• Monitor production incidents and quality metrics, driving corrective actions and continuous improvements in testing practices.
• Partner with product managers and engineering leads to define release readiness criteria and quality exit conditions.
• Mentor QA Engineers on test techniques, automation strategies, and effective communication with development teams.
• Establish traceability between requirements, test coverage, and defects to provide clear visibility into quality status.
• Define and maintain standards for test environments, test data management, and testability support.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to ensure quality practices meet regulatory and organizational standards.
• Analyze test metrics and trends to identify systemic risks and drive actionable improvements.
• Facilitate cross-team alignment on testing approaches for new features, platforms, and integrations.
• Promote a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous learning within the QA function.
• Support the execution of test plans that validate functionality, performance, security, and compliance requirements.

Requirements

• Bring 10 or more years of experience in QA, including at least two to three years in a lead or senior QA role with direct people-management responsibility.
• Demonstrate the ability to stay hands-on in active releases, tracking delivery commitments, removing blockers, and holding the team accountable to quality outcomes without micromanaging.
• Show deep understanding of release governance, including experience with go/no-go decisions, enforcing sign-off conditions, and managing quality risk across multiple concurrent releases.
• Possess a strong technical grounding in manual testing, API and backend testing, and automation, credible enough to review the work of QA Engineers and provide substantive feedback.
• Prove experience conducting and guiding root cause analysis across frontend and backend defects, connecting systemic quality risks to process and tooling improvements.
• Exhibit strong data instincts, designing metrics frameworks and presenting a coherent quality story to non-technical stakeholders and senior leadership.
• Excel at influencing and aligning cross-functional teams without direct authority.
• Apply a collaborative leadership style that builds trust with engineers, product managers, and senior leaders alike.
• Maintain some of the good-to-have qualifications, including ISTQB Advanced or Expert certification.
• Gain experience scaling QA practices across distributed or multi-timezone teams.
• Develop background in conversational AI, NLP platforms, or high-volume real-time systems.
• Acquire experience with GitLab CI/CD practices.

Practical notes

• Work Timings: 12:30 PM to 9.30 PM IST