Principal Quality Engineer

About LawnStarter

LawnStarter is the nation's leading on-demand marketplace for lawn care and related services, with over $150M in annual bookings. We're expanding beyond lawn care to become the one-stop shop for all home services.

About Engineering Quality at LawnStarter

Our QA team is growing, and we're investing real money in better test coverage. We already have shared quality standards and a QA squad that organizes itself horizontally across teams. What we don't have is someone dedicated to owning that vision: every QA is heads-down on their own team, so nobody has the room to drive the standards forward, unify how the squad works, or push the state of the art. That's the gap this role fills. It's not a nice-to-have we're adding because things are going well. It's the structure and leadership we need to make what we've already built actually compound.

The Role

You'll be LawnStarter's first Principal Quality Engineer, reporting directly to the Head of Engineering. We already have quality standards, working CI/CD gates, and AI tooling in the mix. Nobody owns the vision behind all of it, drives it forward, or leads the QA squad that keeps it running. You will.

This isn't a QA management job today. You won't spend your day approving tickets or chasing bug counts. You'll take ownership of the standards and tooling that already exist, work collaboratively with the QA squad to improve them, and keep pushing the state of quality engineering forward as the org grows. As the QA squad grows, this role could take on direct people management of QAs, so hiring, coaching, and performance management experience is a real plus even though it's not the day-one job.

You're not starting from zero, and you're not inheriting a mess either. That means the job isn't "invent a strategy nobody has thought about." It's "listen to the QAs who live in this every day, understand where the pain is, and lead them toward what's next." We need someone who reads where LawnStarter is today and builds from there, not someone who shows up with a favorite tool stack and a coverage number they picked before they met the team.

What makes this role different:
- You own and evolve the quality strategy together with the QA team, instead of building one in a vacuum or just executing someone else's.
- You have direct sponsorship from the Head of Engineering and the room to keep growing the AI-native tooling already in the mix.
- Your success is measured by how much better the whole engineering org's quality gets under your leadership, not by a headcount number.

What You'll Own
- Strategy and vision : The company-wide quality engineering roadmap, plus a quality accountability framework that spells out what engineers, EMs, and PMs each own at every stage of building software.
- Test strategy across the stack : Unit, component, contract, API, end-to-end, mobile, and non-functional testing (performance, load, accessibility), agreed with each team as their quality contract.
- AI-native quality tooling : AI agents and skills, including Claude Code style tooling, that any engineer can run on demand for test generation, code review, and quality guidance. You'll keep hunting for the next AI capability worth putting in front of the team.
- CI/CD and test infrastructure : Required checks, quality gates, E2E and visual regression pipelines, performance budgets, and the mobile test automation strategy across emulators and real device clouds. That includes deciding what actually needs to block a deploy versus what can run async, and keeping the pipeline itself fast.
- Production quality signal : Tying monitoring into incident response and building dashboards teams actually check, not ones that just exist.
- Technical mentorship of the QA discipline : QA engineers keep reporting to their own Engineering Managers today. You won't manage their day-to-day or their careers right now. You'll own the technical and craft side of QA org-wide, mentor QA engineers across e