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 Quality: Our coding agents write most of our tests. Curate what they are told: the shared testing skills, patterns, and guardrails that decide what gets tested, at what level, and how. Verify the output is load bearing using mutation testing, rather than assuming a green suite means a covered feature.

- Coaching & Culture: Focus on coaching over absorbing workload. Review the tests that arrive with a pull request, whether a developer or an agent wrote them, asking probing questions to ensure they prove meaningful outcomes. You raise the developers' ceiling by mentoring them on test efficacy.

- Fold Back and Compound: A lesson that only lands in one spec is a lesson we pay for twice. When something is missed, get the reasoning back into the shared skills, gates and patterns so the next feature starts better than the last. This is what makes the role shrink rather than grow: every fold-back reduces how much intervention the next feature needs from you.

- Hands-on When It Counts: Coach rather than cover. You still open the editor for exploratory testing, a missing test, a gnarly end-to-end flow, or awkward test data, but that is the exception rather than how you spend your week. Expect this to be heavier in your first months and lighter as the skills mature. That reduction is the point.

- Holistic Quality: Help the team integrate performance, security, and accessibility into our quality practices. You contribute to ensuring accessibility is asserted against our live shared config.

The Person

- Technical Lead: You are comfortable in the code and review your team's work to ensure high standards. You lead by evidence, using traces, benchmarks, and reproduction scripts to help the team make decisions.

- Systemic Thinker: You look beyond individual bugs to identify pipeline or architectural failures. You contribute to engineering systemic solutions that prevent recurrence.

- Evidence-Based Guide: You help the team understand success through metrics like mu