QA Lead job description

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

RESPONSIBILITIES
- Judge readiness for a release spanning several teams on incomplete evidence and under pressure, and defend the call afterwards.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Lead requirements analysis across several teams, coach others in spotting untestable criteria, and get analysis engaged earlier in the lifecycle.
- Use defect patterns to recommend where your team should invest in prevention.

REQUIREMENTS
- Experience at the Senior QA Engineer level (level 3 of 5) or equivalent
- Holds ISTQB Certified Tester Foundation Level, ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Analyst and ISTQB Certified Tester Advanced Level - Test Automation Engineering

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 Prioritization — 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.
- Defect Management — You can use defect patterns to recommend where your team should invest in prevention.

Automation
- Automation Framework Design — You can set automation framework strategy across the organization, 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, and decide which 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.
- 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 program 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 behavior.

Specialist Testing
- Load and Performance Test Design — You can set the performance test approach for a product, including realistic workload modeling 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.
- Baseline Security Testing — 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
- Test Strategy — You can manage test strategies across several delivery streams, arguing for quality effort in terms of risk avoided.
- 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 behavior 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 keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can make the call on a problem outside your expertise and explain its cost, time and risk.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in good practice from outside the organization and make it work here, and your judgment clearly improves the work 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 agreement on the facts and the next steps, and help colleagues frame 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.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were not involved can carry it on.
- 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)