QA Lead

Job Title: QA Lead Reports to: Engineering Manager, SRE & QA Location: Ireland (remote) Purpose We are hiring a QA Lead who starts hands-on to run our QA team day to day. You will be embedded in one pod as a Quality Engineer, the same as the rest of the team, and you will also lead that team: three Quality Engineers report to you. You are the connection between the Engineering Manager and the QA team. The Engineering Manager sets quality strategy and direction. You turn it into day-to-day practice, feed the team's reality back up, and carry the operational load of goal setting, performance reviews, coaching, and reviewing your team's work. You stay hands-on and technical throughout. Most of your quality leverage is upstream. Our pods spec features in depth and hand them to coding agents that build the feature and its tests together. Inside your pod you are the advocate, not the executor: the voice asking the awkward questions, pushing the failure modes nobody thought of, and making sure the spec and our shared testing skills are good enough that the agent produces the right tests, at the right level, catching the right things. Expect to be hands-on early while that foundation is still thin. Expect that to reduce deliberately over time as the skills sharpen and the pod's own quality thinking matures. Key Responsibilities QA Team Leadership: Lead the three Quality Engineers who report to you. Set their goals, run their performance reviews, coach them day to day, and review their work. You are the senior voice they turn to on what good looks like and what to do next, and the first escalation point when they are stuck. Spec-Time Advocacy: Be in the room while the pod specs a feature, before any code exists. Ask the awkward questions, push the edge cases and failure modes nobody has thought of, and hold the line that acceptance criteria are testable and traceable. A vague spec produces vague tests, so this is where most of your quality leverage lives. Agentic Test Qualit