QA Lead job description

Quality engineering — QA Lead
Sets automation and quality standards for a team and coaches others.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Test Analysis
- Exploratory Test Charters — You can plan a charter set that covers a feature area by risk rather than by habit, coach others in chartering, and fold session notes back into the test approach.
- Risk-Based Test Prioritisation — You can set the risk-based approach for a team's whole test effort, and re-rank it when new information, such as a production incident, changes the picture.
- Requirements and Acceptance Criteria Analysis — You can lead requirements analysis across several teams, coach others in spotting untestable criteria, and get analysis engaged earlier in the lifecycle.
- Boundary and Equivalence Test Design — You can teach the technique to others, review their case sets for gaps, and combine it with other techniques where equivalence classes alone miss real risk.

Automation
- Automation Framework Design — You can set automation framework strategy across the organisation, including build-versus-adopt decisions for shared tooling, and be the final call when teams disagree on approach.
- API Test Automation — You can set the API automation approach for a product, including how tests handle test data, environments and flaky dependencies, and coach others in it.
- UI Test Automation — You can set the UI automation approach for a product, including where UI automation is the right layer versus API or unit level, and coach others in writing stable tests.
- Regression Suite Maintenance — You can rebuild a suite that has lost the team's trust, cutting run time and duplication without losing coverage that matters. You are the one who decides which regression tests survive a large refactor.
- Test Code Review — You can review tests across unfamiliar components and complicated setups, and catch the coverage gap nobody had framed as one. Your reviews teach: the same problem stops appearing in that author's next pull request.

Test Engineering
- CI Test Pipeline Integration — You can set the CI test pipeline strategy for a product, including what blocks a merge versus a deploy, and diagnose pipeline-level flake that automated-test fixes cannot reach.
- Test Data Management — You can set the test data strategy for a product, including how production-like data is generated or masked safely, and fix data-related flake others cannot trace.
- Test Environment Provisioning — You can design provisioning for test runs that span several services and awkward third-party dependencies, and decide what to stub rather than run. You are who people call when a shared environment is wedged.
- Flaky Test Diagnosis — You can chase flakes rooted in the product or the infrastructure rather than the test, including races that only appear under load. You hand teams the pattern behind a class of flakes, not just the single fix.
- Test Reporting and Metrics — You can design reporting for a programme with several teams and competing definitions of done, and keep it honest under pressure to look green. You retire a metric once it starts driving the wrong behaviour.

Specialist Testing
- Load and Performance Test Design — You can set the performance test approach for a product, including realistic workload modelling from production traffic, and tell a genuine regression from environment noise.
- Accessibility Conformance Testing — You can set the accessibility testing approach for a product, coach others in manual technique beyond automated scanning, and get findings fixed before release rather than logged and left.
- Security Testing Fundamentals — You can apply common security testing technique, such as input fuzzing and session handling checks, across a feature without being told which checks to run.
- API Contract Testing — You can introduce contract testing across services owned by different teams and settle who publishes and who verifies. You use it to shrink the end-to-end suite rather than to add another layer on top of it.
- Cross-Browser and Device Testing — You can choose the browser and device coverage a feature needs, weighing real usage against test cost, and run it without direction. You reproduce a device-only defect that a developer could not.

Quality Leadership
- Release Readiness Assessment — You can judge readiness for a release spanning several teams on incomplete evidence and under pressure, and defend the call afterwards. You state what would change your answer and how fast that could be found out.
- Quality Coaching and Enablement — You can lift the quality skill of people who do not report to you and did not ask, and get developers testing their own work instead of handing it back. You can tell coaching that changed behaviour from coaching that was merely enjoyed.
- Quality Gate Definition — You can design gates for a pipeline serving several teams with awkward tradeoffs between speed and confidence, and decide when a gate is retired. You can say what each gate has actually caught since it went in.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run work spanning several teams, negotiate scope and sequencing with their owners, and maintain one shared plan that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work spanning several teams, name the assumptions each figure rests on, and re-cut the plan as those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement demonstrably improves the projects you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level (required from QA Engineer)
- ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Analyst (required from Senior QA Engineer)
- ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Automation Engineering (required from QA Lead)