QA Engineering Lead

About the company They're a growth-stage engineering org that just closed a significant funding round and are using it to build out a stronger, more senior technical team. The current team is 12 people (7 backend, 2 frontend, 3 manual QA), and they're moving deliberately from a manual-heavy QA process to an automation-first quality culture. They're looking for people who want to understand how the business and product actually work — not just execute tasks in isolation — and this hire is a key part of that next stage of growth. Role summary They're a mid-size engineering org (12 people) shifting from manual-heavy QA to an automation-first quality culture. You'll design and build their test automation strategy and framework from the ground up — one that scales cleanly as the team and codebase grow over the next several years. You'll set technical direction, build the first version of the framework hands-on, and lay the groundwork for hiring additional automation QA engineers. You'd report to engineering leadership, own quality strategy for a backend-heavy product (7 backend / 2 frontend engineers), and come in as a Lead / Senior IC with technical leadership — not a people-manager role on day one, but you'll mentor and later help hire 2+ automation QA engineers. This is a hands-on build role first, leadership-track second. Key responsabilities Design and build a test automation framework and strategy (UI + API) that scales across a growing backend-heavy codebase (currently 7 backend / 2 frontend engineers). Choose and stand up the core tooling: automation framework, CI/CD integration, test data management, environments, and reporting/observability for test results. Reduce flaky tests and build for maintainability — self-healing locators, retries, isolation, parallelization — so the suite stays trustworthy as it grows. Partner with engineering leadership on the roadmap and hiring plan for additional automation QA engineers, including interview process and technical scr